by D. A. Hill
Newton’s
Ark
by D.A.Hill
Book One of the Emulation Trilogy
Copyright © 2012 D.A.Hill
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead
is purely co-incidental.
To my parents
who always believed in me
and
to my wife Marie
who always sees the best in me.
prologue
January 2050
The man sank into the reclining chair with a sigh of relief. Several hours of eating and drinking had made him tired, but he would not have traded this moment for the world. He had celebrated way too hard, but he did not regret that; it was not every day you celebrated your sixtieth birthday in space, surrounded by your loved ones.
“Come on granddad, tell us the story,” the girl pleaded as she snuggled up beside him.
“Which story would that be?” he replied, pretending he did not know exactly which story his granddaughter Elizabeth meant.
“The story,” she replied with a playfully exasperated tone. “The story of how we left the Earth.” She also knew that her grandfather knew exactly which story she meant.
“Oh that story. But you’ve heard it so many times before my dear.”
“We know granddad, but you know kids,” his fifteen year old grandson Eric said. He pretended not to share his nine year old sister’s excitement. “They like to hear the same stories over and over again.”
He knew that was true. His grandchildren really did not tire of the story no matter how many times he told it. It was fortunate then, for him and for them, that he never tired of telling it, not even the very sanitized version he had to tell. There were parts of the story that were much too dark for children. And there were things they just were not supposed to know. At least not yet.
“In that case, Eric,” the man replied with a conspiratorial wink, “I suppose I should tell the story. To keep your sister happy you understand.” He knew Eric liked the story just as much as Elizabeth did, maybe more since he was old enough to remember his part in it. But at fifteen Eric was trying on adulthood for size; his grandfather was not going to be the one to burst his bubble by pointing out that it was still a size or two too big.
He waited for his grandchildren to settle before continuing. As he surveyed the room he smiled the smile of a man completely contented with his life, contented despite knowing that everything he saw was an illusion, and contented despite the fact these children he loved so much were not really his grandchildren. In fact they were not even real children. Hell, in ways that most people back on Earth would have considered important, he was not even himself—but he was not supposed to mention that…
chapter 1
March 2030
Colonel Manny Smith went over the mission briefing in his mind as he lowered himself into the pilot’s seat and the technicians began attaching cables to his head and body. A routine reconnaissance mission would be a nice change of pace after some of the recent missions he had flown. He knew that sooner or later he would make a stupid mistake unless he eased off a little.
Not that he minded the excitement—combat pilots were known to be adrenaline junkies and Manny Smith was no exception—but given the shortage of pilots who could do what he did, he had been pushed, and been pushing himself, too hard for too long. Only a quarter of the pilots who entered the drone program graduated, so there was always a shortage. It was not their flying skills that were the problem—only experienced pilots were selected for the program—but the psychological effects of the link. Those who could not tolerate it never flew again. The lucky ones were quietly discharged on medical grounds with a generous pension and a new life in some out of the way town. The unlucky ones saw out their years in a Veterans’ Administration psychiatric facility.
It seemed a high price to pay but UAVs—Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as the drones were officially known—were now the way the US Air Force went to war. Manned aircraft had three critical weaknesses. The first problem was it took years and large amounts of money to train combat-ready pilots, so strategy and tactics were too often constrained by the need to conserve this scarce resource. It was not a new problem. As a military history buff, Manny Smith knew the very same problem had nearly brought Fighter Command to its knees during the Battle of Britain way back in 1940, ninety years ago. The lesson, which had stood the test of time, was that it was faster and easier to replace planes than pilots.
The second problem was that the American public had grown accustomed to wars in which enemy deaths numbered in the thousands while American casualties were virtually non-existent. After the fiasco in Iraq twenty-five years ago, the US had avoided ever again putting significant boots on the ground, or pilots in the air. Doing so just gave America’s enemies the opportunity to shoot at, blow up, kidnap and generally maim and murder young Americans. The United States had decided that it was much better to kill bad guys from a distance.
The final problem was the constraints the physical limitations of the human body placed on the performance of a manned aircraft; a drone could be built with much higher maneuverability thresholds than any manned aircraft. America’s enemies had realized the same thing; in 2030 sending a manned aircraft into a combat zone was like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Manny pulled on the virtual reality headset. There he was in the cockpit of his aircraft sitting on the runway in Incirlik, Turkey ready to open the throttle for take off. A lot had changed since the early days of the drone program in Afghanistan, twenty years ago. Back then piloting a drone was like playing a video game; you sat in a dark room watching a low resolution feed from the drone’s cameras on a video screen and controlled your aircraft with a joystick. Now, with the virtual reality headset, the feedback chair he was sitting in, and massive amounts of data coming from the drone’s sensors, the pilot felt exactly like he was in the aircraft flying it.
—o—
The mission had been uneventful for the first ninety-seven minutes. It was in the ninety-eighth minute that it all began to go pear shaped. Manny’s instruments indicated that an enemy missile, almost certainly Chinese, had a lock on his aircraft. “So much for routine,” he cursed to himself. For all the surveillance technology his country had at its command, the intelligence that filtered down to guys like him on the front line could be maddeningly inaccurate. Unfortunately all the computers in the world could not tell you what was going on in the mind of your enemy. For that you needed human intelligence, HUMINT as they called it—operatives on the ground who could blend in with the local population for long periods of time. Unfortunately HUMINT was an area where the United States had been seriously lacking longer than Manny had been wearing a uniform.
Manny put his plane into a hard dive to the left. The aircraft was pulling 10Gs but the feedback chair cleverly attenuated that to 6Gs, using his physiological limits to tell him that the aircraft was nearing its engineering limits. The information on his heads up display indicated that the Chinese missile was still right behind him.
Manny was flying one of the most sophisticated aircraft ever built, a design the United States had thrown its best minds and trillions of dollars into developing so they could keep ahead of the Chinese. Too bad the Chinese were throwing their best minds and whatever trillions of dollars was equivalent to in their money at building weapons systems to defeat it.
Most of the time American aircraft still managed to come out on top. Most of the time, but not this time. Manny was pushing his aircraft to the limit, using every trick he knew, and still he could not shake the Chinese missile. He relu
ctantly concluded that his aircraft would soon be nothing but a pile of junk cluttering a poor farmer’s field in some anonymous country in Central Asia. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Manny did as he was trained to do and pushed the abort button. Like any pilot worth his wings he hated losing an aircraft, but he definitely appreciated knowing he would be going home to his daughter tonight.
—o—
Manny felt the virtual reality headset and the monitoring cables being removed. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the blurry outline of a face filled his field of view.
“Colonel Smith, can you hear me?” a female voice asked.
Manny nodded as his vision cleared. He hated this feeling. As much as he loved flying, at forty he was getting too old for this. It was disorienting enough when you completed a mission and the link was closed down in a controlled manner. When you had to abort and the link was cut abruptly, it left you feeling like you had the worst hangover for days—without the pleasure of getting drunk first.
Manny smiled as he recognized the voice as belonging to a particularly cute technician. He had almost asked her out many times, but always changed his mind at the last minute; raising a daughter on his own made it all seem way too complicated. Maybe soon. He told himself he should start dating; his daughter would be going off to college in a few months. But he had made her the center of his personal life for so long Manny was not sure he would know how to build a relationship with anyone else.
As the nurses and technicians continued to prod and poke him, Manny heard the familiar voice of his commanding officer, General Rhodes.
“What happened Colonel?”
“Chinese missile got a lock on me sir,” he croaked as he sat up reaching for his water bottle, his mouth and lips parched from several hours without hydration. “Couldn’t shake it. Deployed counter-measures to no effect. Damn they’re getting good.” He took a big swig. That would at least keep him going until he could get to something a little stronger.
A technician spoke. “Bio-indicators are within an acceptable range, General.”
“Good. Manny, go home and get some rest,” his commanding officer instructed him. “We’ll debrief you fully when the docs say you’re ready.”
“Yes sir,” he replied groggily, imagining his aircraft blown into a million tiny pieces. He was glad he was not in it.
—o—
Manny’s world exploded in a blaze of light and heat. He had just enough time to wonder what had gone wrong. Had the self-destruct initiated early, or had the Chinese missile hit his aircraft before the link could be severed? Not that any of that mattered. Either way his only real regret was knowing he would not see his daughter graduate from college, that he would never see her get married, that he would never be a grandfather…
—o—
Cyrus Jones was proud of the work he did. It was crucial to national security, that was what they said, the men and women in uniforms who had recruited him. They told him he had a chance to be a patriot. Although he would have to work in the shadows, hidden and unacknowledged, he would be doing what needed to be done to protect his countrymen from danger. That should be enough, even if the government could never allow the American people to know what he did.
More importantly, he got to work at the cutting edge of technology and push his not inconsiderable programming skills to their limit. He would have done this work without the patriotic appeal, but being part of the military-national security complex certainly had its advantages. Great pay, great benefits, job security and a sense of immunity. Being part of the establishment did not put him above the law, but he was generally left alone by the sort of petty bureaucrats who loved to use every obscure law and regulation to lord it over others. Even if you were guilty of a more serious transgression the law was typically applied in the most forgiving manner possible, especially if the system felt you could still be of use. That was how he ended up on the drone program in the first place; he had been caught hacking some highly sensitive government computer—not until he was well and truly inside the system of course—and instead of locking him up they gave him his dream job!
Cyrus had done his job so well in his time on the program that not one pilot had figured out what was really going on, and with the improvements he was always making he was confident that none ever would. He was good, but he also had a little help along the way. Nearly twenty years of Moore’s Law at work—six or seven generations of processing power doubling every two or three years—meant today’s unmanned aircraft had more than a thousand times the computing power of the early drones.
He was not entirely sure about not telling the pilots what really happened when they sat in the feedback chair and put on the virtual reality headset, but his job was to take care of the software, not to worry about the wetware. Cyrus Jones was no moral philosopher; he could not debate the morality of what they were doing, whether it was right or wrong or the pilots should have been told. He did know that it was a whole lot less dangerous for the pilots than flying combat aircraft the old fashioned way. That was good enough for him.
chapter 2
June 2045
The tension in the Situation Room hung thick in the air as they awaited the arrival of President Carlson. The Secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security and State along with the President’s Chief of Staff, the National Science Advisor and the NASA Administrator sat silently, glancing anxiously around the room, watching each other nervously. All had years of government service under their belts; none had ever had a task as undesirable, as frightening, as delivering the news they were about to deliver.
“So people, what is so important that you needed to interrupt my Sunday afternoon nap?” the President joked as he entered the room.
They all looked to the President’s Chief of Staff Jack Brown to take the lead. “Mr. President, we have received some disturbing information from the Copernicus Deep Space Telescope.”
The President turned to the NASA Administrator and gave her a look that would freeze water. “Karen, I hope you are not going to tell me we have wasted another trillion dollars putting a pile of junk into space.”
Karen Schauble squirmed in her seat and wished for a moment that she was somewhere else. Three of the four major NASA missions during her tenure had been unmitigated failures. One had exploded on launch, one had done a beautiful swan dive into the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, and one had been hit by a micro-meteor just three millimeters—about an eighth of an inch—in diameter, taking out the power cell, leaving it floating dead in space. At least it was floating dead in space further out than any man-made object had ever traveled before, but NASA Administrator Schauble decided against mentioning that detail.
Despite NASA’s unenviable track record, its litany of failures since the glory days of the Apollo program, the Copernicus Deep Space Telescope program had been funded. NASA, like all government agencies, had a dedicated constituency, influential people and organizations who benefited from its existence. So it was impossible to kill. And if a government agency existed, it had to have something to do and therefore it had to have money to do that something. In effect NASA existed to ensure that space missions continued and space missions existed to ensure that NASA continued.
“Fortunately not sir,” Karen Schauble replied, relieved that at least this time she had some success to report. “Copernicus is working exactly as expected,” she said proudly. “It has increased our ability to see small and faint objects at the edges of our solar system and beyond by a factor of ten.”
“So what is the problem?” the President asked impatiently.
Sensing the President’s displeasure his Chief of Staff interrupted. “Mr. President, the telescope has detected a previously unknown object with a very worrisome trajectory.”
Jack Brown had been with Paul Carlson since he had first run for the Senate twenty years ago. Jack understood that of the many things he did for the President, one of the most important was making sure he heard t
he truth clearly, even when the truth was unwelcome. If Jack Brown was using weasel words like very worrisome, it must be bad. Really bad. “Jack, no need to sugar coat it. Give me the bad news.” Paul Carlson had learned long ago that the best thing for bad news was to get it over with.
“Of course Mr. President,” Jack Brown replied. “The object Copernicus has detected, officially designated 2045KC, is approximately fifteen kilometers or nine point three miles in diameter and will hit the Earth some time on December 20, 2047.”
“How sure are we of this?” the President asked calmly, determined not to over-react.
“Earth impact probability is ninety-seven percent,” the National Science Advisor answered.
An asteroid hitting the Earth definitely fit the definition of very bad, and these people were clearly very worried—people he had appointed, people he trusted—but nine miles did not seem so big. “What damage should we expect?”
“Sir, 2045KC is one and a half times the diameter of the object responsible for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event,” the National Science Advisor replied.
“Which is?” the President asked. Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event was just so much scientific mumbo-jumbo to him.
“The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.”
Everyone in the room held their breath as they awaited the President’s reaction. He looked around the room at them, his face white, and then started at his feet for a minute. Finally he looked up, the color returning to his face as he took a deep breath. “So to summarize, you’re telling me there is a chance that two and a half years from now the human race will go the way of the dinosaurs, wiped out by an asteroid?”
“That’s a fair summary sir,” the National Science Advisor replied. “Although I would characterize the odds as more than just a chance—I’d say way better than even.”
