The rest of the shift is uneventful. I return to the Bridge and issue orders. I direct the Helm to plot a course to coordinates fifteen hours by forty-five degrees by seventy-one light years, the approximate location of the Theatre Command. All such positions are given relative to Earth. The actual heading would be approximately minus one hour, one minute by plus eleven and three-quarters degrees, by forty-seven light years from our current location. At one time, the OESA considered using galactic coordinates, but this proved confusing. This trip will take eight and a half days. There isn't time to continue our search for the Pirates operating in the region, and there are no systems we can patrol on our way to Theatre Command, without heading out of our way. My day's not over when the watch ends. It has been a week since the last lecture session, so I have another scheduled training lesson to lead. I head for the meeting room.
……………………………………………………………………….
"Captain on the deck!" A voice snaps out to the rest of the attendees, in the room.
"As you were, people – let's continue where we left off last week. Who can answer the questions I posed, at the start of the last session?" I ask.
I look about eyeing several hands that have been raised. I do not recognize many of the Junior Officers with their hands elevated, but I decide to call on one of them from my list. It would be a good means to make contact and get to know each a little better.
"Ensign Engava, do you think you can answer all the questions?" I ask.
"Yes sir, I do. But first, I wanted to mention that we all noticed your change in rank, and on behalf of our class, I'd like to congratulate you on your promotion." She responded.
"Well, thank you Ensign, and, thank you all very much for the kind wishes. If you'll continue, Ensign?" I prompt her for the answer to the questions.
She responds. "First, you asked – why an Empire? I believe that an imperial form of government was chosen to rest all real authority in one place. Having an Empire eliminates all intermediate levels of government such as state governments.
Then, you asked – why not a democracy? I believe we live under as Democratic a system as we can handle. We have proven we cannot deal with the diffusion of genuine democracy. We operate like one, but there is one person to shake out the wrinkles when we have difficulties. The Constitution allows the Legislative Assembly to essentially run the government but gives the Emperor final say. Our Emperor pretty much rubber-stamps everything the Assembly does. That seems to be the same pattern followed by the five Emperors who preceded him. In two hundred years, those six people have only stepped in a couple of times each. In those cases, they prevented issues from stagnating when a consensus could not be reached, or when a piece of legislation could have been harmful to the overall well-being of the Empire.
Then, you asked – why would a dictatorial state want a constitution? I believe the previous answer proves this one. I feel the people who established this Empire always wanted its citizens to have a representative government. But, they looked back at the past and created the best system they could that would allow for representation, but have a failsafe means to eliminate the failings experienced by previous governments.
You also wanted to know, why the Constitution enshrines rights. I believe it's to ensure the population that no one is trying to put them under the yoke of oppression. I also think that it was a means of establishing what is acceptable and what is not. I say this because the Constitution also spells out null rights, which are, in effect, rights we do not have.
Your next question was – why is religion forbidden. I believe it's because, in the past, people used religion as a means to circumvent other sections of the Constitution. It was also used as a basis for political philosophies and was very divisive, in this way. Finally, religion was the source of many terrorist uprisings and the reason behind many wars that were fought throughout Earth's history. Personally, I've always believed that religion is men telling other men how they think God wants them to live their lives. I also feel it has been used as a means to control the masses. I think the next question about representation was answered in the replies for all the previous questions.
Your final question is – why is separation forbidden, in the Constitution? I honestly think that the issue of separation from a state you joined willingly is a specious one. The cessation of a region from an existing sovereignty would destabilize the remaining territory and the territory that separates. It would be absolute pandemonium. Separation affects the state of your economy, the military, the Legislative Assembly, and the distribution of districts within the Empire. It may also serve to place a future enemy on, or within, our borders. So, it also creates a severe security problem." The young Ensign finished as he took his seat.
"Very good, Ensign - very good, indeed.' I acknowledge as I turn back to the rest of the class. 'The questions we're going to try to answer after today are as follows. What motivated the formation of the OESA? Which man is responsible for our ability to travel interstellar space? What person is responsible for molding the OESA into the configuration employed today? Who is the current C and C of the OESA?
………………………………………………………………………
Old Tom McCracken died in 2036, at the age of eighty-five. He worked for Edward 1 until he retired in 2032. By the time he passed, those people located in the former states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California had joined the Empire voluntarily. Most had been living in anarchy. Some were getting by, but others could not see a way to reorganize and lived in extreme poverty. Only a few isolated settlements had limited services. Most had some form of informal leadership – usually a greedy local tyrant. They began to investigate when they heard stories. Most of these tales had been started by a group of agents sent out by the Empire to subtly spread the word. The goal was to gain the hearts and minds of those people - to conquer them peacefully. Several communities sent missions to Florida, which returned with stories of full services, a national government, and a good standard of living. One after the other, each of the seven states received a large mission from Florida. Each time, a couple of officials accompanied engineers, security specialists, teachers, and doctors, on the authorized visits. Each tour was relaxed. No visiting member was restricted by the accompanying officials. They were allowed to travel freely, and speak their minds. The result of the campaign was that six of the seven r zones requested membership in the Empire. New Mexico, the seventh, had to be coerced with a little peer pressure by the other merging states.
The original format for the creation of the Empire was followed. The populated regions of each constituency were divided into districts containing about ninety thousand people. They elected representatives to go to the Assembly in Wildwood. On December 1, 2025, the Empire officially had two hundred eighty-five districts representing over twenty-five and a half million survivors.
The original pattern for restoring services, government, education, and business was pursued in those regions. A year and a half after joining the Empire the seven former states boasted full services and a reasonable and rising living standard.
For its part, the Empire grew its military to one million twenty thousand and began restoring the old NASA facilities along the southern belt. It opened trade with regions that expressed any interest. It assisted the reestablishment of industry and business that had wilted or failed during the apocalypse. Some activities were much more heavily regulated than in the past. Food processing was severely restricted in an attempt to attain inexpensive but healthy food choices. Trade always led to new inductees. By 2030, the name of the Empire had been changed, officially to the World Empire as it controlled all the inhabited territory in the western hemisphere and sixty percent of the eastern one. This world government now had twelve hundred and thirty-four assemblymen representing six hundred seventeen districts around the globe. Its population base was now more than fifty-five millio
n. Its military had grown to one and a half million. This was a figure that, the Secretary of Defense felt they could settle on, for quite a while. Though there were still over a billion people in the world not governed by the Empire, but no other people had recovered to the point where they could support a military of any consequence. The two largest regions outside its territorial boundaries were India and southern China, which housed most of the remaining survivors. Each of those would be a strain to absorb unless the Empire enlisted all the rest of the remaining globe first. Once the economy was big enough it would be able to support each of these significant inductions, one at a time.
Old Tom was already gone when Edward the First was succeeded by Victoria 1 in late 2045. She inherited a realm in sound economic shape. It supported important scientific research in many fields, including a space program run by the renamed NASA. It had been called WEASA, since 2028. Edward had poured a lot of funds into restoring many of the old associated companies, so their work could be continued, instead of starting over. Amtel was the result of combining the two largest and most advanced microchip developers that existed before the Apocalypse. Old Tom had seen to their amalgamation and resurgence. It was his pet project of 2031. One of his greatest discoveries was a young scientist that he chose to head its research department. Tom liked to call Doctor William Black - Blackie. It grated on Bill, though the old man used the nickname affectionately.
Blackie was twenty-four and held an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a master’s level graduate degree in computer systems sciences when the worldwide collapse led to the closing of his school. When the Empire re-opened Florida State, he registered achieving his Ph.D. in the discipline just a year later. His thesis on artificial super intelligence was groundbreaking. Associates and professors all agreed this man was the next Einstein. He was a visionary with a goal and the energy to achieve his ends. He fostered a design for an intelligent computer system he tagged CCAI.
Blackie’s prototype was comprised of four microprocessor groups. Each processor ran two hundred fifty-six cores. Four processors comprise each group. Each of those assemblies had terabytes of very high-speed memory under its control. One group controlled input/output. One employed absolute logic to solve problems. The third also used logic tempered with firmware and software algorithms that moderated the calculations with moral and ethical considerations. The fourth brought it all together, like the corpus callosum of the human brain. Determining what weight should be given to each solution, it melded them into a final one. Nearly half a billion lines of programming code gave the combined assembly near-human abilities to extrapolate and question - based on solutions. It would always try to take every result to the next step. He called this arrangement Corpus Callosum Artificial Intelligence or CCAI for short.
It took them nearly four years to debug and test the system, but CCAI solved the first problem presented which was to describe gravity. Dr. Black was not looking for how its energy emanated or interacted, but rather, what makes it work the way it does. It was a revelation to a curious world. It was much simpler than imagined.
From the analytical solutions, cosmologists and astrophysicists developed a theory that "empty" space is dark matter - a dense fluid-like medium composed of quark-like fermions, gluon-like bosons, and Higgs-like bosons, along with dark energy. Since no other analogs exist, like those in our normal phase, neither the weak or strong atomic forces exist. Dark matter exerts a negative gravity and negative mass. That field is responsible for the never ending expansion of space. Displaced dark matter leaves a charge deficiency in the medium creating what we perceive as gravity. The "big bang" was really a big conversion. An unknown disturbance caused an interaction between dark matter and dark energy igniting a chain reaction of particle transformations to the phase we detect today. In this phase, several new particles were possible, allowing for combinations generating the weak and strong nuclear forces. Wherever mass displaces dark matter, it creates gravity. The more mass – the greater the field, because a proportionate amount of dark matter has been shifted. The shock wave of the conversion created the web-like pattern in dark matter we know now but see as a negative photograph. The web is actually the regions of low concentration of dark matter and high gravitational force, and the areas in the spaces of the lace-like lattice work are dense regions of the particles.
So, the team asked the CCAI to develop a system to generate artificial gravity. Though hefty and cumbersome, the device CCAI created worked. It is based on a method of producing relativistic mass, employing a multi-stream massive particle accelerator. By this time, Amtel was maintaining sustained profits and sales, as were other tech operations restarted with Imperial assistance.
Amtel added additional teams to prove other applications for CCAI. Physics, medical, aerospace, weapons, industrial, agricultural, computer design, and economic specialty versions were developed that incorporated hardware and software tuned to their specific disciplines. Much of the work built on that already started before the near apocalypse. The original team continued to collaborate on miniaturizing and refining the CCAI concept, with the aid of the prototype. By the time they were done, the CCAI core, without peripherals, was the size of a baseball and could be energized for years by a single power cell designed by the prototype machine. With input and output devices, it could see, hear, smell, feel, and talk. It mastered conversation, and its command of optical character recognition allowed it to read.
Lab based units were loaded with all the world's knowledge and applications to use it in their particular fields. Operating systems were encoded with the logic to call and close each application's programming, as needed. Remote units employed compact versions of the same database, but all could access central libraries remotely.
The most shocking development was by a small robotic team that used the baseball sized generalized CCAI to power a lifelike robot that used carbon nanotube fibers, to develop muscle like power for its own limbs. It walked like a person. It talked like a person. It seemed self - aware. Maybe it really was a person. It even had a sense of humor.
Now that I've laid the groundwork – you’ll each find another handout on your pads. It will take you quickly through the next hundred years of the Empire which include the creation of the OESA and the development of interplanetary and interstellar space flight. Dismissed." I call out as I tapped my pad to transmit the handout; then, left the room as every rose to attention.
Chapter 4 Rigil
Sunday Jan 30, 2101
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein
The Empire’s road to Rigil was filled with discovery. We were in the fifty-sixth year of Victoria One's reign, and she had been a great leader. She maintained Edward's technique of governing at arm's length but had a way of getting legislators and councilors to push through what she wanted while feeling like it was their idea in the first place. She was viewed as a benign and benevolent leader, and the citizens of the Empire loved her. She had grown from a beautiful, sweet young woman, when she was crowned, to a beautiful, charming grandmother in 2101.
Behind the scenes, she pushed territorial expansion, scientific advancement, and economic development. In 2093, she welcomed more than sixty-six hundred representatives from India to the Legislative Assembly, bringing the total to forty thousand representing twenty thousand districts around the globe. The Earth was now under one government. Representatives cast votes electronically in a massive stadium-like complex with seating, services, and computer voting interface at each station that served the forty thousand members. Most made their arguments from their own station, but representatives often had to wait, as long as, fifteen minutes for someone to come down onto the floor of the assembly to make an impassioned plea. A recess was often called to create the break needed to reposition legislators, during such emotional debates. But, it ran like clockwork. No one bunged up the works with regional concerns. The Emperor could just step in and overrule e
veryone. So, everyone cooperated.
A great deal of support was sent WEASA's way in the first decade of Victoria's reign. And additional support was provided to outside companies that provided WEASA with technology. Not the least of these was AMTEL. As the years passed, Dr. Black would ask for government funds for the many space related projects he worked on. His lab was so prolific that, he always got what he wanted. Sometimes, "Blackie" produced results that were proven but impractical, so work often had to be turned over to another funded specialty lab to refine the application. At any rate, he used CCAI to develop artificial gravity, nanoparticle energy recycling, mobile fusion electric power generation, multi-phase / multi-layered ionic/magnetic shielding and a host of other systems and improvements that could be employed in space.
Construction finished on the prototype gravity generator in 2040. Improvements continued until 2042, when a control system using a CCIA could envelop and accelerate two thousand streams of five hundred thousand heavy baryons to near “C” around a one-kilometer accelerator, generating a one and a half Earth gravity field within its confines.
In 2043, WEASA built the first disc-shaped craft with the first gravity generator and fitted it with the latest Ion Propulsion System (IPE). A six-week round trip to Pluto proved the gravity generator but showed WEASA wasn’t ready for interstellar flight, since that translates into ninety years to reach the closest star. Fitting the vessel with the new AAMP anti-matter propulsion system decreased the next Pluto trip to twenty-seven-and-a-half hours each way. It was fast, but still meant a fifty year round trip to Alpha Centauri.
Righteous Reign The Series: E-version Boxed Set Edition Page 5
