Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  ESCAPING THE SUN

  by Rhett Goreman

  All characters, places, organisations, and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons or deities, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All artwork and text Copyright © 2013 David R. Donnelly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  All views and opinions expressed are those of the author. Neither the author, publisher, distributor, nor their servants shall be under any liability for loss or damage, including consequential loss, whatsoever or howsoever arising as a result of the use of this publication.

  This eBook was first published in the United Kingom 2013.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-9533388-2-5

  Published by David R. Donnelly.

  http://techdes001.wix.com/designer

  To all my family

  for their support and encouragement.

  But especially to my wife

  for her patience and attention to detail.

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21

  Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27

  Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Preface

  My name is Rhett Goreman. I consider myself extremely lucky to be alive. My run of good luck, if you can call it that, could end at any moment. Therefore, please take note of what I have to tell you. I might not be given another chance.

  This is not a book about time travel. Yet my story starts around five hundred years into your future and ends more than a billion years beyond that.

  In that future, the world is a much hotter place. The Sun is expanding and will eventually grow to become a red giant.

  Humankind needs to plan its escape from the searing heat of the Sun. And I can say now those plans could have been successful, had it not been for the actions of one desperate madman.

  Many lives were lost during our fight for survival, and most of those deaths were considered collateral damage. Whole communities were never given the chance to understand why they had to die.

  The frightening thing is, I might well be the only human left who knows what really caused the disaster that befell the world I used to call my home.

  So read on, as I reveal how civilisations crumbled under the rule of an unseen tyrant and how humanity confronted its darkest hour; and if you find this disturbing, then there may still be time for you to do something, anything you can, to change the fate of our people.

  Consider my story as an important gift from that far off future, delivered to you via the distant past.

  The text might have been discovered in starlight observed by your Very Large Telescope in Chile. It may have arrived on radio waves being studied by SETI. It could even have been found on a memory stick in the back pocket of an engineer operating the Large Hadron Collider.

  Whichever way I conveyed this message back to your own time on Earth, it is now up to you, as its reader, to understand and act upon it.

  The ultimate fate of the human race is in your hands.

  Chapter 1 – Inspiration

  My story begins on Earth, in the Twenty Sixth Century, some five hundred years into your future.

  Food and fuel supply-wars, political unrest, and economic uncertainties have continued to both inspire and impede social and technological progress. From that melting pot, a single worldwide government has emerged. On the whole, this new regime has brought peace and prosperity to those in gainful employment.

  The steady growth in the world’s population has been successfully managed not by wars or governments, but by the now commonplace extremes of weather. And, I have to admit, the divide between the rich and the poor is just as great as it ever was.

  Anyone unwilling to work for the Authorities, or who cannot afford to pay their taxes, is expelled from the system. They are left to fend for themselves in the few remaining forests, or up in the high mountains.

  But I should explain, this is only the very beginning of my story, and all too soon I was forced to leave that world behind. It all seems a very long time ago.

  *

  I suppose, I would have been classed as a Ruffian by the Authorities. I grew up living in amongst the ruins of a fallen city, along with many other orphaned children.

  Yew trees and Rhododendron bushes pushed through the damp, crumbling, red brick walls of the half buried room where I slept. My bed was a mound of leaves, heaped up under a short flight of stairs that, like myself, was going nowhere. My dirt encrusted clothes were little more than rags. They had been pulled from the collapsed wreckage of a fine shopping mall many years before. Fine shards of glass, sparkling across the dusty floor, were a mere memory of windows that used to keep out rain, winds and snow.

  One of life’s ironies was that global warming, caused by the excesses of previous centuries, had resulted in both hotter summers and colder winters. Furthermore, almost all the trees and shrubs that thrived in the forests were poisonous species that could not be safely burned or their fruits eaten. Without firewood, adequate food, and proper shelter, both of my natural parents had succumbed to the cold during one particularly harsh winter.

  My understanding was that the technologies of the past had let the majority of people on Earth down in a big way. They had caused the consumption of vast amounts of natural resources. They had polluted the seas, the rivers, and the air, and they had put devastating weapons in the hands of governments and terrorists.

  The disintegrating, forgotten city where I lived had been largely reduced to rubble during an automated bombing raid many years before I was born. It had never been rebuilt, mostly because the land would have taken too much energy to clear at the time. Furthermore, its ageing concrete and brick construction no longer met the modern standards, required by the Authorities, to keep out the extremes of weather we orphans simply had to endure.

  There were so many trees, clinging onto the derelict buildings that, at first glance, the whole area looked like a dense woodland. An outsider could have been forgiven for thinking there were no buildings at all.

  It was an ideal place to hide from the Authorities. We didn’t know why we had to hide, but hide we did. There was much hearsay suggesting what might happen to those who were caught, and we had no wish to find out which of the rumours were true. We guessed we would be sent to work in places that were either too magnetic, too wet, or otherwise too corrosive for robots.

  Fortunately, the Authorities rarely ventured into our forest city. They were usually trying to track down anyone who had stolen food from a corporate plantation. They only came to round up children on one particular day per year, known as Adoption Day.

  It wasn’t just the Authorities we were hiding from either. The adults of the forest and their families would not think twice about ransacking any stores of food, generally nuts and berries, that we orphans might have gathered.

  My life then was completely devoid of any technology, or of any animals larger than rats for that matter. There had been an attempt to re-introduce horses to help the people o
f the forest clear land, plough fields, pump water and build proper homes. However, like many other beasts of burden, horses had proved too valuable as a source of meat.

  Although life was hard, it could be rewarding. We looked after each other as a group. The older children did their best to help younger ones learn how to hunt and forage for food.

  I made good friends with another boy who had a filthy mop of curly hair. He was just as skinny as myself, but he was taller and had larger hands and feet.

  Always hungry, he used to dream of a better future: a plentiful future full of delicious things to eat. He also often dreamt of the far off mountains, where one day he hoped to meet a cave girl and raise a family.

  *

  Needless to say, it was only a matter of time, before the location of our group of young Ruffians became known to the Authorities. One fine summer’s day, a dozen men and women, dressed in their charcoal grey uniforms and peaked caps, surrounded our makeshift home.

  Squinting through a crack in the wall, against strong sunlight, I could see they were armed with impressive, shiny, black rifles and they clearly meant business.

  For a second or two, children of all ages scurried in every direction, checking each potential escape route. My curly haired friend, tried to squeeze into a rusty ventilation shaft. Nonetheless, all that frenzied activity was to no avail.

  I remember the sharp sting of a tranquillizer dart sticking in my neck, and a sudden feeling of warmth surging through my veins.

  However, I now realise this was all for the best, and we need not have panicked.

  It was a harsh but true fact, that the people of the forest were tolerated, to a certain extent, and left where they were, simply to breed hardy children.

  The civilised world had major problems with falling birth rates, inadequate disease resistance, and also various ethical issues relating to genetic screening. These problems and issues could all be overcome by utilising the age old principles of natural selection: survival of the fittest. This worked particularly well in the forest, because no-one ever spoke about those who did not survive, or the terrible conditions people there had to suffer.

  Therefore, a certain percentage of children, who managed to reach the age of five or more in the wild, were brought in for adoption, to supplement the gene pool. I was ten years on the run before the Authorities finally caught up with me.

  Experience had told the Authorities that the older ones, like myself, had to be drugged for some time after their capture. This was to stop them trying to escape back into the forest, and to prevent them from lashing out at their carers.

  At the time of our capture, we were pretty rough around the edges: not far removed from savages. However, the Authorities had machines that could strengthen connections between the neurons in our brains. In other words, they could implant academic knowledge directly into our minds. Every day, for a year or so, the same new memories would be continually rewritten until they became permanent.

  Eventually, the Authorities declared us as having attained a basic understanding of language, arithmetic, the civilised world and its rules. At the same time, the drugs also caused some pre-existing memories to be lost. It would be several years before it finally dawned on me, that I could piece together the splintered dreams I was having to form a coherent picture of my own past.

  One day, I was lying in my prison-like cell, waiting to be taken for another statutory knowledge implant, when the door was cautiously opened, not by my carers but by a smartly dressed young couple. They seemed to be as shocked, nervous and excited as I was. Apparently, I had been selected for adoption by these particular people because scans of my brain - taken during the knowledge implant process - had shown that I possessed a higher than average I.Q.

  This was my big break. I had been thrown a lifeline, and I had to grab hold of it with all my might. I found myself in the arms of a new mother and father who were able to feed me, educate me, and above all love me. And I soon loved them in return.

  *

  Some may say, I should have spoken out about the plight of those who remained in the forest, to fight their corner, but I thought it better that I complete my education first.

  Much to my new father’s delight I was a quick learner, and soon absorbed everything he had to tell me about science and technology.

  I always wanted to know how things really worked, how to build crude radios, telephones, and signalling systems. Once, I set up a Morse key in my bedroom and then programmed our house robot, whom my mum had christened ‘Dave’, to exchange short coded messages with me over some wet string trailed through our flat.

  In what seemed no time at all, my father had enrolled me on a university course, although neither of us believed increasingly complex technologies should be the solution to every problem.

  My father and I were always imagining a day, come the revolution, when all sophisticated, high-technology gadgets stopped working, and could never be repaired.

  What a contrast there was between the often cold and unsavoury forest world I had come from, and the glittering, warm, picture perfect environment I would spend my formative teenage years in.

  *

  With the advent of nuclear fusion based power stations, the dream of plentiful and cheap electricity had been realised. Gone were the wind farms and solar panels of old. Our ultra-modern sparkling, glass covered, air conditioned towns and cities shone with electric lights of all the colours of the rainbow. Major cities were interconnected by reliable and efficient, high speed, underground, electric, magnetically levitated trains.

  Cloud computing, internet telephony, television and social media were by then so ubiquitous they were simply referred to as ‘The Ether’. With interactive display surfaces in every room, on every wall and on every table top, few people needed to leave their homes. Ether based applications allowed people to communicate for both work and play. They entertained, educated, and kept everyone informed of every new up-coming game show or financial services product.

  Traffic cameras watched over the dead straight roads and fields that linked the smaller towns to the cities. Sometimes, the cameras spotted Ruffians running from a forest, cutting through fencing, trying to steal vegetables from one of the sprawling greenhouses that protected our genetically engineered food crops from the elements. Armed Police were sent to intercept the raiders. If caught, thieves were dealt with swiftly and severely.

  Needless to say, raw materials were scarce. Not that long ago, a third world war had been started due to governments accusing each other of rare earth and helium gas hoarding. During that war, whole countries had been fought over and mined for their precious minerals including metal ores, gemstones and essential building materials.

  Although most of the hard graft was carried out by specialised robots, mining continued to be the most dangerous of all jobs, with many tunnels extending beyond old national borders under the oceans. And I am pretty sure at least some of the captured Ruffians would have been sent to work in those mines.

  *

  On a brighter note, there were two suns in the sky at that time. Our familiar Sun was one of them. The other was the star Betelgeuse. This was more than just a light show. It was an important enough phenomenon to command the collaboration, and attention of academics and government advisers from across the globe.

  Over just a few days, Betelgeuse had grown to be brighter than the full Moon, despite being more than 640 light years away. The Earth was bathed in light both day and night for a few short weeks. It became an impressive display, posing little immediate threat to humanity, but providing a wake up call to the Authorities and ordinary people alike.

  Betelgeuse had gone supernova. Over many years it had swollen to the size of a solar system. Now it had simply popped, producing a massive fireball, blasting its outer layers billions of miles into space, annihilating anything in its wake. It was dying, impressing itself into the memory of all who were capable of observing the event. It was going out in a blaze of glory.<
br />
  Because of its distance, Betelgeuse was still seen as a star like point in the sky, its blinding white light shining into the night and casting eerily sharp shadows. However, over the next few hundred years that point source of light would expand and cool to become a giant multi-coloured gas cloud, the same apparent size as the Sun to an observer on Earth.

  It was estimated that high energy particles from the blast would reach the Earth in around a hundred thousand years time causing brilliant aurora over Earth’s magnetic poles, and posing a danger to space travellers for the following ten thousand years.

  Although our Sun is not expected to explode in the same way as Betelgeuse, it has always been predicted to grow in size. Ironically, the Sun will have almost finished its expansion phase when it has completely filled the orbit of the Earth around it. However, well before then our oceans will boil dry, and all life on Earth will perish. But there is no need to panic. I can assure you this will not happen any time soon.

  For centuries, many other mass extinction scenarios had been constantly brought to the attention of the educated public. Super-volcano explosions, extreme global warming, or even a new ice age had all been predicted for many years; and it was well understood that the longer we delayed our escape to another world, there was always the possibility of a large asteroid impact wiping out virtually all life on Earth.

  Each possibility was regularly considered by policy makers for its likelihood and potential damage to society. The highest priority risks resulted in proposals being put forward for some form of mitigation planning to be put in place.

  It had been known for some time the most effective way to ensure the long term survival of the human race, would be to colonise other planets: especially those orbiting stars other than our own Sun. To that end, various space administrations and academic societies started to draw up plans to build a practical inter-stellar starship way back in the Twenty First Century.

  Unfortunately, most of those plans were never implemented. Only a few designs actually got off the drawing board and into development. Some early rocket propelled prototypes were destined to drift endlessly through empty space, having made very slight navigational errors from the outset. Other attempts at building a viable starship had either exploded or imploded, depending on the experimental technologies incorporated in their star-drive engines.