Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  ‘He seems to have been reading a book. Escaping something.’ She rubbed her thumb over the cover. ‘Escaping the Sun.’

  Leaning over the desk, I tried to pick the book up to find out what its subject matter was, but the slight pressure was too much for the wood, most of which had perished with dry rot. The whole structure, Perkems and all, crumpled in a heap on the floor. A cloud of dust rose into the air.

  My confidence crumpled with him. I was clearly out of my depth. Tukarra held on to me tightly but then we both were startled by a shuffling sound from behind us. Our heads spun around to see what was making the noise.

  It was Dave, the house robot that I thought we had left behind at my old family home. He came out from the shadows, looking as good as new.

  ‘Welcome Rhett,’ Dave said using my father’s voice. ‘I am so glad that you made it here. I have had to keep most of my life a secret from you, but the very fact that you are here probably means that there is no need for secrets any more. Please sit down, what I have to tell you, is not all that pleasant.’

  Dave waved his arms in the direction of a pile of white dust that may originally have been a stack of plastic chairs. We sat down, cross legged on the floor, instead.

  Dave continued where he had left off, again acting as a proxy for my father.

  ‘My dear son, I am so sorry to have to tell you that I have killed a man and ruined the life of his daughter, all for the sake of a scientific experiment. The man I killed was my friend and colleague Vitcha Kesinko and I think you knew his daughter Ellie. I lost my moral compass for a while, and I wish that I could turn back time to save them both but I can’t.’

  That certainly grabbed my attention and also Tukarra’s.

  Dave appeared to draw in a deep breath and so we prepared ourselves for a lengthy explanation.

  ‘Firstly you need to know that my relationship with Vitcha was a strange one. At times we were rivals, sometimes we even hated each other, but we also had a deep respect for each others minds. On rare occasions, I would ask Vitcha for help with a problem, and sometimes he would come to me. We were like comic book arch enemies forced by our military paymasters to work together under the one roof.’

  ‘His team was building their first starship. It was already in solar orbit when I hatched the idea that it needed one of my biological quantum computers to keep control of it. It was going to be the biggest computer of its kind ever built, but there was something missing. It would lack imagination. In its million year journey it would meet the unexpected and would surely need a measure of imagination to solve any problems. At the same time, Vitcha said that he desperately wanted to observe another star system at close quarters but his body would never live to see the day. Well adding two plus two and getting five, he begged me to build his own brain into the core of the computer that would be controlling the starship.’

  ‘As it happened, both of us were highly respected by the military and were rarely asked to explain our research. As long as we kept delivering results, no-one ever came to check up on us.’

  ‘Focussed, blinkered, passionate, mad scientists that we both were, we did it. We actually pulled it off. I developed nanites, call them electro-mechanical bacteria if you will, that were able to connect living neurons into the starship’s central processor, and other nanites to build an artificial heart and blood supply to keep a disembodied brain alive.’

  ‘One fateful day, I gave Vitcha a general anaesthetic and operated on him. On that bench over there.’

  Dave waved an arm indicating a metal table some way off in the background.

  ‘I merely had to cut open the back of his head with a laser knife, and the nanites did the rest. Within a few minutes, I had his brain, and a fully functional life support system, mounted in a large black box that both provided fluid exchange, plus electronic, and photonic, connectivity to the outside world. The plan was to keep him in a deep sleep until he could be installed into the starship.’

  The room was swimming around my head now. I felt numb, sick to my stomach, trying to grasp the enormity of what my father had done in the name of science. Tukarra was just as shocked as I was. We were both glad that we had taken Dave’s advice to sit down.

  ‘On my next scheduled visit to the starship, I took the box with me. It looked just like any other biological computer hardware. I managed to keep its content a complete secret even after I had fitted it in position. I told no-one what was in the box. My own team of scientists and engineers knew better than to ask questions about military hardware they didn’t recognise.’

  ‘When I came back to Earth, I had to dispose of his body in a way that would not reveal that it had a rather large cavity in the back of its head. So just before that last big rocket launch...’

  Dave turned his head to one side, and swivelled his eyes so he could stay looking at me.

  ‘Do you remember Quatinus 1?’ my father’s voice asked, without truly expecting me to answer. I found myself nodding anyway.

  ‘... Well I smuggled Vitcha’s body out of the bunker inside a trolley intended for moving nuclear warheads around. Under cover of darkness, I tied his arms and legs onto a metal framework normally used for holding sensors and other devices for sampling the exhaust gasses from the rocket. After the launch, there was very little evidence left, and everyone assumed it had been a successful suicide attempt.’

  ‘From our mission control room in Lab #5, I sent a string of commands to the starship and managed to revive Vitcha’s brain without any problems. He soon acquired full control of the ship’s systems, but I was the only person able to communicate directly with him. And when he did communicate, an unexpected problem came to light - a problem that Vitcha had previously put to the back of his mind. He realised that he would never see his daughter, Ellie, again and she would probably not want to know him any more either.’

  ‘So when Ellie came to pick up his things from the base reception he asked me to try out another experiment, this time on her. I was to implant a chip in her brain connecting her to the Ether.’

  ‘It was easy. I escorted Ellie to a private reception room where Vitcha’s personal effects had been laid out on a table. I offered Ellie a drink containing a sleeping draught and in next to no time at all she was on that same operating table, having a quantum communication chip inserted in her head by Dave. Dave made a really good job of it, leaving only the slightest of scratches behind one of her ears. Dave helped me to smuggle her back into the reception room, and she accepted the story that she was simply coming round after a “dizzy spell”.’

  ‘Once the link was established between Vitcha and Ellie, he could watch over her and they could exchange thoughts and ideas with each other. Unfortunately, this caused Ellie to think she was hearing voices in her head. And then to make matters much worse, Vitcha developed megalomania.’

  ‘Suddenly the whole universe seemed to revolve around Vitcha’s brain. His survival became more important to him than anything else. Trying to find ways that he could live forever, he was not only thinking outside the box but the box itself started to grow roots - firmly and irreversibly embedding his brain into the infrastructure of the starship. Worse still, he was beginning to divert some key cloud computing services to the highly advanced on-board computing facilities. He seemed to be trying to take full control of the Ether itself!’

  ‘So I had to come to terms with the fact that I had effectively killed my friend and turned his daughter mad.’

  ‘Of course, I had achieved all this in my own time and in total secrecy. Meanwhile, my day job had also seen some considerable success.’

  *

  My father’s voice continued, ‘I invented teleportation. Well, I say I invented it. In fact, Vitcha had invented his own teleportation system some years before but its use had been turned down by the top brass. The subject had to be dissolved in a bath of liquid, while their consciousness was destructively read by nanites and transferred into a robot - something like Dave. The Commander in Chie
f of the armed forces said that it “made his flesh creep”, and that he “would only use it with volunteer convicts to work behind enemy lines in desperate circumstances.”’

  ‘You’ll find Vitcha’s system in Lab #6, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near it if I were you.’

  ‘Unknown to Vitcha, my team had come up with a much better system, the one that you now see before you. We first demonstrated it to the military and other V.I.P.s by transporting the camp mascot, Kaku the cat, to another military base.’

  ‘About the same time, the colonel’s yacht was found on the roof of the Academy building. That wasn’t us, but I’m sure it helped our cause, and the money came flooding in for us to complete our research.’

  ‘So the rocket, Quatinus 1, was in fact fitted with hundreds of cylinders like the ones you see before you. The plan was to teleport people from Earth directly into those tubes; as soon as possible after Quatinus 1 reported back that it had safely arrived at New Earth. Of course we would have to wait for the radio waves to travel back to Earth at the speed of light, and then a description of the people being teleported would have to be sent up to Quatinus 1, also using radio waves, also travelling at light speed, and taking another million years or so to get there.’

  ‘But then I hatched the most brilliant idea of my long career. This was the show stopper for Vitcha’s proposed fleet of star liners. Instead of waiting for Quatinus 1 to reach New Earth, I could use my teleportation system to encode healthy living people as a stream of quantum data bits, and then store them in a recirculating memory already implemented within Quatinus 1 itself. I was able to show that this was a much more efficient and less risky way to transport people over the vast distances of inter-stellar space.’

  ‘So, as soon as Quatinus 1 lands, the teleportation sequence can be picked up exactly where it was left off and the subjects can be reconstituted almost immediately. This meant that humankind did not have to wait another million years before migration could start, waiting for a radio message to come back to us from New Earth and another million for the first settlers to get there.’

  I looked at Tukarra, and she knowingly looked back. It was clear, from what my father was saying through Dave, that neither my father (at the time of his recording) nor Dave (at that moment) knew that Quatinus 1 should already have reached its final destination by then - by my reckoning more than nine hundred million years earlier in fact.

  Dave pressed on, ‘More importantly, as far as our military and political leaders were concerned, they would be able to save their own skins without experiencing any of the issues associated with being given a robot’s body, or from having to maintain people in frozen suspended animation for millions of years.’

  ‘It was then we became victims of our own success. Instead of developing more systems, to allow a future mass migration that could have saved everyone on the planet, I was ordered to fill the memory of Quatinus 1 with as many of our top brass, politicians and other celebrities as possible.’

  ‘Overnight, the starship building programme was shelved. That’s when I came to see you, Rhett, and gave you those gold cards. I knew that Vitcha would be devastated. Everything he had worked for would come to nothing. He had even given up his own body to ensure that he would get to see other worlds for himself. I knew he would have his revenge, and that it would be something catastrophic for me, you, and probably the whole of mankind because he was rapidly gaining control over everything connected to the Ether.’

  ‘As it happened, he chose to use our own protective network of robotic asteroid deflection ships against us. He commanded the robots to attach Dark Matter engines to a few asteroids in the outer solar system, and then send them hurtling inwards towards the Earth.’

  ‘He intercepted the data from the advanced optical and radar collision warning systems, and fed us with misinformation. Everything looked in order, to the scientific community on Earth, right up until the moment that he took the Ether down.’

  ‘The next thing we knew, the first asteroid had hit the Moon. It was then discovered that, only a day or two later, the Earth would be hit by three more asteroids. Just about every living thing on the surface of the planet was going to be wiped out. True, a handful of people might have survived in shelters like this bunker. However, when their food stores eventually ran out they would have had to live like savages, hunting down and securing any remaining resources from each other. A dark cloud miles thick was expected to wrap around the world that would take decades to dissipate. Nothing would grow in the dim light. Life on the surface would never be sustainable again, of that I had no doubt.’

  ‘I myself was ordered to leave as a data stream, on Quatinus 1, with the other V.I.P.s, partly to help with the revival process on New Earth, but also as a show of faith in my own work, like an architect asked to live in a penthouse atop a revolutionary new building he has designed.’

  ‘I called in Perkems to ask him if he knew where you were. After some investigation, he found that you had indeed used the gold cards that I gave you, and you had volunteered to be frozen in a stasis pod. So I asked him to ensure that, when the the dust settled and you were revived from your cryogenic sleep, that you should be brought down here with your friends and be amongst the last people to use my teleportation system. He was glad to oblige. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for his Academy students - you and your friends in particular.’

  ‘Perkems was also under strict orders to blow up these laboratories to prevent any “undesirables” following the V.I.P.s onto Quatinus 1. But if you are hearing this message then we can assume that he hasn’t carried out the order yet and there must still be time for you to leave with us. Good luck Rhett, and God’s speed.’

  Then, Dave started to speak just like Perkems. This only added to the sense of shock and awe. My hands were shaking, and I could feel my heart pumping harder than ever. I couldn’t help but look at what was left of Perkems while Dave spoke.

  Perkems’ voice revealed that my father had not actually made it to Quatinus 1, and then launched into a detailed explanation as to how that had happened. I assumed that either Perkems, or perhaps even Dave, was probably hoping that I would not apportion any blame on them for my father missing the boat.

  ‘Aleq had taken it upon himself to close down Vitcha’s laboratories. There was an “accident” when he went to shut down Lab #6. No one on Vitcha’s team had suspected, that the tank of transporter fluid could reach out and grab hold of anyone passing by it! Trying to find out what had happened to Aleq, I came across a video recording, captured by a security camera overlooking the tank. The thick yellow fluid seemed to have grown sucker clad limbs overnight. They must have been hidden from view, coiled up under the surface of the liquid. Aleq was taken completely by surprise, and those terrible prehensile arms dragged him down into the slime. That was the last anyone ever saw of him. So I locked up that laboratory and forbid anyone to go in there ever again.’

  At this point, Dave took back control of his own speech using his old fashioned, factory default, didgeridoo-like, synthetic voice.

  ‘As you have observed, Perkems faithfully stayed at his post, this desk, waiting for his people to be revived some twenty floors above us.’

  ‘Sadly, after several asteroid impacts when just one would have been enough to kill off most of the human race, the shock wave from the largest one killed Perkems where he sat. The sudden change in air pressure ruptured his lungs. In fact, only those frozen solid in stasis, such as yourself, had any chance of survival.’

  ‘I took it upon myself, to take on Perkems’ role, and to carry out your father’s request, to wait for your revival. I have waited almost a billion years, maintaining myself and the minimum of systems to ensure these teleportation tubes will still work for you. It is very fortunate therefore, that just two remain in working order. Are you both ready?’

  As if to spur me on, and prevent me from mulling over the abhorrent reasons for me being where I was, the ground shook once more. Somewhere in
the depths of the laboratory, a rack of equipment toppled over and crashed onto the floor. The whining noise that had accompanied all of the recent quakes jumped in intensity, and was beginning to make my head hurt and my teeth rattle.

  I turned to Tukarra and asked her, ‘Are you ready?’

  She unequivocally agreed saying, ‘This world may only have minutes left to live.’

  I stood up, and helped Tukarra onto her feet. Taking a tight grip of her hand in mine, I raised our arms into the air in a determined show of strength, and shouted, ‘Let’s do this!’

  Two empty glass tubes rotated to reveal slim openings, not much wider than the revolving doors we had experienced earlier.

  Dave asked us to pick one each, and then stand inside them. No sooner than we had complied with the instruction, the tubes rotated back to their starting position making an air tight seal around us.

  Tukarra shouted at the top of her voice to be heard through the glass, ‘I hope that where we are going there will be liquid water.’

  ‘Any reason, in particular?’ I shouted back.

  ‘Because you have still not had a shower since I met you!’ she replied, laughing nervously.

  Dave went over to a control desk, pressed a few buttons and turned a few dials. He then switched on a dozen or more heavy duty, battle hardened, closed circuit television monitors. The screens showed views of sand dunes, mud flats, and lakes. Several of the pictures were completely blank. There was little doubt that some cameras had failed, or were mounted on the dark side of the planet. Furthermore, a great deal of time had passed since their installation and so they could equally well have been lost under ground, under water, or shrouded by dust storms. Only one screen showed any signs of movement, and Dave repositioned himself to get a better look at it.

  A broadside array of conical radio masts was rising out of the ground somewhere in the desert. Dave leaned even closer to the screen, to check some important detail. What ever he saw pleased him, and he emitted a low hum, rather like the purr of a satisfied cat.