It was not all bad news, however. We had been successful in deflecting a relentless onslaught of large comets and asteroids away from our planet for the last hundred years.
The technology to detect troublesome chunks of rock hurtling towards the Earth, some several miles across, had been put in place. Robotic spacecraft positioned around the outer reaches of our solar system had been deployed. It was their job to track down each offending object, attach a powerful rocket propulsion system and then give it a shove.
A deflection attempt was always going to be successful when the body was in a predictable elliptical orbit. A single well timed shove would be magnified each time the asteroid or comet passed by the Sun, until the object was no longer a threat to the Earth.
Most problematic were the asteroids that apparently came in from nowhere. They often originated from the cloud of rocks or the scatter disk, just outside our solar system, or from inter-stellar space. Sometimes there was less than a few weeks warning, and they came in extremely fast, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. It could be very difficult for the robot ships to catch up with them.
It is against this background of probable death and destruction that the global government was eventually formed and the human race set itself firmly on a course of self preservation.
Therefore, building on ideas first explored in your own century, three approaches to attack this problem had been proposed...
First - More underground bunkers were to be built. Some to house people, animals and plants in suspended animation. Others were to maintain an archive of genetic samples taken from every significant life form.
Second - The same technology used to deflect asteroids away from us was to be utilised to bring selected asteroids into Earth orbit. Here they could be mined for their precious metals and turned into lifeboats for a lucky representative fraction of the human race.
Third - The most advanced spaceships ever envisaged would finally be constructed to carry the healthiest and wealthiest cream of society out of our solar system altogether and away to another star.
Yes, three ways of preserving the human race were to be pursued, or so most people had been led to believe.
*
What I have done for you here is to depict the time and place that I will always think of as my home.
As my story unfolds, it is important for you to remember I am describing events that will happen many years into your future, but which were actually key turning points in my past.
In the following pages, I will reveal how humanity confronted its darkest hour, with the beginning of the end just happening to coincide with my graduation from university.
Chapter 2 – Graduation Day
Graduation Day was a special occasion. It was special not just because of the speeches, the presentation of diplomas and the official photographs, but also because it was one of just a few opportunities I had to actually meet up with my fellow classmates. This may not be so surprising if I tell you that, like most other academic courses at that time, I had done the majority of my studying at home. Distance learning packages had improved over the years and students like myself could benefit from one-on-one personal tuition, given by a virtual holographic lecturer, and live video conferences with specialist mentors.
My successful graduation was even more rewarding because my father had insisted on my learning the subject the hard way. By that, I mean I learned my subject from an actual tutor, albeit a virtual one, through worked examples and by writing essays. It’s not that we couldn’t have afforded to buy additional knowledge implants for my brain. It was just that my father wanted me to think for myself, to think along different lines to everyone else, to be independent of the very technologies he was helping to develop.
There I was, stood in front of a full length mirror, adjusting my hired black robes and mortar board hat, flanked either side by my parents and looking very smart I thought. Perhaps, I wasn’t quite as macho, as I would have liked, but a couple of girls I knew had said I looked cute and I was happy to settle for that.
A rather stout and seemingly well fed student came over to use the mirror. He was having trouble stuffing his unruly and voluminous ginger locks into his hat - which kept slowly rising, like a magic trick, off his head.
‘Curly,’ I exclaimed.
‘Rhett,’ he called back, open mouthed.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘We must have been studying at the same university, all this time.’
‘It’s amazing our paths haven’t actually crossed until now,’ I added, finishing his train of thought.
‘Look, I have to meet up with my classmates,’ he said. ‘But we must keep in touch. Are you going to the after-party at the Students Union tonight?’
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied. ‘I’ll see you there.’
‘Right. We’ll catch up at the Union then.’
We shook hands and wished each other the best of luck with the ceremony. Then Curly zoomed off to have his photograph taken with his peers, who were waiting on the balcony above us. As he scurried away from me, long suppressed memories, of my childhood as an orphan in the forest, came flooding back into my mind; but this was not the time to discuss my past.
*
My mother helped me to put on the blue and yellow hood I had been handed when we arrived. She was beaming and proclaimed as usual that my deep, dark brown, puppy dog eyes would get me into trouble one day.
Today was also a special occasion because my father had found the time to attend the ceremony. He too was sporting a broad smile and looked very smart himself although a little uncomfortable. I had never seen him dressed in a suit before.
Just then I noticed one of my own classmates in the mirror and turned around to see her. It was Ellie Kesinko. She was with her father, Vitcha Kesinko. Mr Kesinko seemed to know my father and they walked off together engrossed in some deep technical conversation.
Ellie had a peachy complexion and flicked, auburn red, neck length hair. She enjoyed being the centre of attention, and could be quite aggressive at times. She had a tendency to offend the feelings of other students.
I always thought she was a little strange. There was some story about a boy who had given her a plant, a Venus Fly Trap, of all things. Apparently, they had spent many a happy hour together watching it take and digest the half dead bugs they fed it with.
Academically, she knew her subject very well and was a force to be reckoned with. She had studied the order of ceremony and it was not long before she was herding my mother and me to take our places in the Great Hall.
*
The Great Hall was a general purpose auditorium situated slap bang in the middle of the magnificent glass dome that covered over the city of Jasperton.
On a circular stage, in the very centre of the auditorium, there were a few rows of chairs where the action would soon be taking place.
I sat down in the front stalls along with my fellow students, just as some uplifting classical music started to play. The sound seemed to be coming from a huge array of crystals, almost a hundred metres high, rising from the walls of the Great Hall up towards the very top of the dome and the blue sky beyond.
The Great Hall started to fill with people. My father came back to sit, alongside my mother, behind the rows of rather nervous students. I noticed Ellie’s father sit down in a chair quite near the front, in a row reserved for special guests.
When everyone was seated, the crystals piped up a rousing fanfare and the ceremony began. His rich red and gold robes swirling around him, the Principal of the University led a procession, comprising the Board of Governors, the management team, their financial sponsors, and finally all the professors and their research assistants, onto the stage. The professors wore different coloured robes signifying their specialist subjects.
After the usual speech about the great reputation of the University and how good this year’s results were, the Principal invited the hundreds of students to form a line and wait to be ca
lled up onto the dais to receive a handshake and their diploma.
The audience applauded everyone. A few of the more popular students and teachers were cheered. Curly was cheered as he walked with a flourish across the stage to receive his award.
My senior professor and main mentor, wearing his blue and gold robes, was also one of those cheered as he called out ‘Applied Quantum Mechanics,’ and then ‘Ellie Kesinko.’
Ellie seemed to be a little distracted. She kept glancing beyond her father toward the back of the hall as she collected her diploma.
Then I heard ‘Rhett Goreman,’ and it was my turn to walk across the platform. I struggled to remind myself to ‘take with the left’ and ‘shake with the right’ as my father had told me.
Remarkably, no-one tripped up or fell off the stage with nerves.
After more presentations, music and speeches, the Principal invited all the graduates to show their appreciation with a round of applause for the staff, and for our families and friends, for giving us their support whilst we were studying for our qualifications.
Then he wished us all every success for the future and closed the ceremony by leading another procession, this time emptying the stage to the sound of a final fanfare.
We all streamed into a small park area just outside the Great Hall for the traditional ‘hat throwing’ photograph. Both my mother and father stayed to watch this spectacle.
Soon after that photograph had been taken, some music started playing in my father’s top pocket. As I might have expected, he was being called back to work. My father was called back to work during almost every family occasion. My mother and I were used to it. A fast car would come and whisk him away to a waiting helicopter and we wouldn’t see him again for days.
*
After handing my robes back to the representative from the hire company, my mother and I decided to go back home. I intended to return on my own for the after-party later that evening and I couldn’t wait to compare notes with Curly.
We said our goodbyes and made for the car park. It was just a short walk to what looked like an empty parking space. Placing her hand on a touch sensitive pad, my mother called our car out of the self storage stacker. The rectangle of road surface in front of us lifted into the air and up came our car, sat on an elevator platform. My mother decided to drive. I settled into the passenger seat, and off we went.
We emerged from the car portal at the base of the dome and began to pick up speed. It had been a lovely day. The sky was clear and there was a great view. The Sun was now low in the sky and that new really bright star was rising in the East. ‘If only every day could be as mild as this one,’ I thought, although weathermen constantly reminded us another ice-age could be on its way.
All around, you could see signs of construction work. All the roads between Jasperton and the outlying towns would eventually be covered over. The curved glass covering would protect traffic from the often violent winds and snow storms. In addition, as with the domes over the towns and cities, the glass would darken during periods of intense ultra-violet exposure (a necessary feature because our ozone layer was still recovering from centuries of excess). The roads had already been built high up on levy-like steep sided embankments to prevent any risk of flooding from a tsunami, natural or otherwise – in fact, a tsunami had been used as a weapon of mass destruction during World War III.
Satellite pictures showed the network of roads looking like a gleaming spider’s web, with Jasperton in the middle, and we were travelling down one of the radial arms towards my home town of Nevillon.
On the way, something happened that would change the course of my life forever. Another car coming in the opposite direction crashed through the central reservation and our car was hit almost head on. There was a massive explosion. We were violently spun around and ended up in a ditch. Then a blazing hulk of twisted metal, what was left of the other car, careered down the opposite embankment and smashed through the wall of a greenhouse.
*
I don’t actually remember anything of the accident itself, apart from a blinding flash of light. I do remember being questioned by Police when I came to, in Jasperton hospital. They were asking about the car’s safety inspection record lodged in the Ether.
My head hurt, I was still in shock but they pressed on, ‘When was your vehicle last serviced?’
‘It’s my mum’s car. I don’t know when it was last serviced,’ I replied.
They continued, ‘Do you have any reason to suspect that either the car or the safety record entries have been tampered with?’
My head hurt even more and my whole body felt battered and bruised. I needed a doctor. I needed rest.
‘It’s my mum’s car,’ I repeated. ‘She always uses a reputable mechanic. She has used the same one for years.’
I couldn’t think of any reason to doubt the safety record. They said that the anti-collision detector had not functioned correctly, all the air-bags had failed to deploy, and the thickly armoured high pressure hydrogen tanks had inexplicably ruptured contributing to the explosions seen by passing vehicles.
One of the Policemen went on to say, ‘The driver of the other car died in a similar explosion on the other side of the road,’ and hardly showing any sympathy he continued, ‘Oh, and we are sorry to have to tell you that your driver is also dead.’
Chapter 3 – Moving On
The Police thought the accident was suspicious because my father was an important scientist who worked for the government. He had been called away, from my graduation ceremony, somewhat unexpectedly and he may have been the real target for some anti-establishment terrorist group.
Further investigations had discovered that the rather up-market car that hit us, was actually being driven by its robotic auto-pilot at the time, therefore human error could be ruled out. The person we thought was driving the car could not be identified because there was almost nothing left of him. This was due to the incredible force of the hydrogen fuelled explosions, followed by an intense fire that had subsequently raged through the oxygen rich greenhouse environment, before the Police had arrived on the scene.
Log files, lodged in the Ether cloud, declared that a tyre had blown out, causing the other car to cross the central reservation, but no physical evidence had been found to support that claim.
Such inconsistencies in log files were not unknown to me. Conspiracy theorists had convinced me the Ether was no longer the impartial repository, and conveyor of information, the general public assumed it to be. Indeed, how would anyone know if past trends of distributed computing, and diverse ownership of the networks, had been reversed. After all, everyone believed that centralised censorship and control of the Ether, by the Authorities, was a necessary evil to maintain world peace.
Aside from the shock of it all, my own injuries were not that severe. I had broken a small bone in my foot, acquired a bruised rib, obtained a few cuts to my face and received a black eye. I was able to get to my mother’s funeral on crutches and with my foot set in plaster.
I saw more of my father than I had done for some time in the weeks after the funeral. He came home most days, at least for an hour, to see how I was getting on. Apart from that, and with my studies completed, I lay on the couch and settled down to watch day-time-television for the first time in years.
At that time, most reality programmes required the viewer to don special interactive clothing and headgear so you could follow the lives of individuals entirely from the subject’s point of view. Those who dared to experience dangerous occupations, or holidays, were paid a bonus to entertain everyone else from the comfort of their own living rooms.
In spite of all that technology, I suppose I am a bit of a romantic at heart; and for once, I just wanted to lie back and enjoy watching a simple love story. That said, there are limits as to how many re-runs of the classic film Casablanca anyone can watch, even if it has been ‘Remastered in Quantum Holographic 3D’.
Therefore, when the doorbell to our a
partment rang, and the projected hologram of Casablanca was interrupted by a view of the front porch, I was both amazed and delighted to see Curly standing there. He had heard about the accident through the Ether and had brought a number of deepest sympathy and get-well-soon cards with him from the University.
When the University had eventually agreed to give him my address, so he could deliver the cards, he was somewhat taken by surprise. It was only then he realised that we both actually lived in Nevillon and we had been studying in our homes, just a few blocks apart, and under the same glass dome.
He thought he would deliver the cards himself and see if he could cheer me up. He didn’t mention the old days, and neither did I.
It turned out he was a self-proclaimed expert at a new multi-player shoot-em-up virtual reality game called ‘Vacation Raiders’. In the game, you had to defend a number of out-of-this-world holiday resorts from aliens that were trying to abduct the tourists. Captured holidaymakers were made to continue their vacation, and so spend their money, at a rival holiday destination on another planet, and you had to stop that from happening. It was great fun being able to see, first hand, the antics of another player, crouching, leaping, shooting, waving his arms, legs and curly ginger hair around. He was a worthy adversary.
The game finished when I had no holidaymakers left in my resort and counting up the money confirmed I had lost the game.
We piled onto the sofa and Dave, our house robot, brought us drinks and pizza slices on a tray. After we had eaten, I thanked Curly for coming round to see me and suggested that we should hold a rematch sometime.
Whilst playing the game, I had completely forgotten I was still in some pain, but now I had to admit that I needed to rest. Curly said, ‘Bye for now,’ and made his way out of the apartment. I was alone once again.
Escaping the Sun Page 2
