Unwilling From Earth
By Andrew Maclure
Copyright © Andrew Maclure 2016
All rights reserved.
Contact [email protected]
www.andrewmaclure.com
This book cover includes images sourced from and owned by NASA. The use of NASA images does not imply endorsement of the cover image or the contents of this book by NASA.
DEDICATION
Dedicated to Ali Cox, without whose love, support and encouragement this book would never have been written.
Table Of Contents
The Artefact
To Work
A Far Away War
Leaving London
First Step
The Chequers
Winchester
The Day After The Night Before
When Sally Met Alan
Victory Is In Sight
Revelation
The Day Of Uncertainty
A Change Of Heart
Orbital
Foreign Food
The High Commander
Friend Of The People
Farewell To Possessions
Meet Mother
Grey Matters
How It Works
From Here To There
Reunited
Meet The Team
Not Who He Thought
Friends?
Did You Enjoy Your Trip?
New Quarters
Conflict Origins
Arms Control
Call To Arms
Offers Of Protection
Preparing To Land
First Engagement
Stretcher Party
Tea In The Forest
Change Of Plan
Walk In The Woods
Why We Do It This Way
Time To Make Up. (Or Else!)
Memories Of New Forest Picnics
Making Friends With Your AI
Into Action
Day Trip
Debrief
Interspecies Nudity
Embrace The Fear
Back To The Front
Welcome To The War
Front Line Friends
Assault
Not Going To Plan
The Unwelcome Officer
Friends Arrive
Breaking The Line
A Rude Awakening
Take Me To Your Leader
Big Bang Theory
No Fall Out
An Unwelcoming Return
The Mad Plan
The Plan Is Considered
No Quarter Given. Except To Mike
Into The Mind Of The Enemy
Sins Of The Past
Branches Everywhere
The Fifth Day
Captured!
How To Get Ahead
Escape
Still Standing
The Tolen
Into The Lions Den
An Unwanted Guest
The Last Supper
About The Craft
Secret Aristocrat
What Not To Do With A Star Craft
Watch Your Back
Sean The Shipbuilder Hands Over The Keys
Not Farewell, But Au Revoir
Boarding The Ship
Willing To Earth
Farewell To IFG
Landlord And Tenants Act
The Name Of The Beast
Foreword
Our best estimate is that the Milky Way, our galaxy, contains between one hundred and four hundred billion stars. That’s an awful lot of stars.
Stars are categorised into types O, B, A, F, G, K and M. Type O and B stars are rare. Our star, the Sun, is a type G star and was considered to be the type of star most likely to have planets and to be capable of hosting intelligent life. A and F type stars have too short a lifespan to give life a chance to evolve into a technologically advanced species. However, opinion is shifting with many now believing that K type stars offer a much better chance for intelligent life to evolve and develop advanced technological civilisations.
The Sun has a lifespan of about ten billion years. It is now about 4.6 billion years old which is plenty of time to evolve intelligent life (if you include humans). Type K stars, which are plentiful, have a wider habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone as it is sometimes called, where liquid water could exist, than type G stars. They have a lifetime of fifty billion years, plenty of time for super-advanced species to evolve, become extinct and have a whole string of intelligences evolve and follow on from them. These type K stars are now considered by many to have a better chance of having planets that develop intelligent life with advanced technologies than our Sun.
All this shows that there are billions of stars that could support life if they had suitable planets.
The Kepler space telescope has been in orbit planet spotting since March 2009 and has so far discovered (at the time of writing) four thousand six hundred and ninety six planets. it is searching one hundred thousand main sequence stars in the single star field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the galaxy, a tiny proportion of the stars in the galaxy. (Source, http://kepler.nasa.gov). It has become clear that planets are common in solar systems and seem to be a normal part of stellar evolution, which means it is probable that virtually all stars have planets.
So what about life on those planets? We don’t have the technology to identify signs of life on any of these planets yet, but techniques are being developed to detect whether they have atmospheres, and if so, whether those atmospheres have compositions that indicate they might harbour life. The Rosetta mission went into orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkaand in August 2014 and landed the Philae lander (bumpily) onto the comet in November 2014. (Source, http://rosetta.esa.int/). It has detected the amino acid glycine, along with the precursor molecules methylamine and ethylamine as well as phosphorus and a multitude of other organic molecules. The conclusion of the abstract of the paper reporting these findings states: “This result demonstrates that comets could have played a crucial role in the emergence of life on Earth.” (By delivering the building blocks of life.) (Source, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/e1600285)
If there are comets with the building blocks of life in our solar system, it is reasonable to assume that these building blocks are common throughout the galaxy and that other star systems comets could have seeded every suitable planet with everything they needed to start life.
This is not fiction. These are all verifiable facts which can be checked by visiting the websites given as sources, above.
With the facts that we have it is pure speculation, but not unreasonable, to consider that extra-terrestrial life may be common throughout the galaxy. If even if just one thousandth of one percent of stars produced intelligent life, that could mean there are between one and four million intelligent civilisations sharing our galaxy with us.
That’s an awful lot of civilisations.
The Artefact
The sixth planet from the star was a gas giant with great rings of icy particles and a scattering of small icy moons in orbit around it. The planet had remained virtually unchanged for four and a half billion years but now it had a new companion. This new companion was massive, but insignificantly small compared to the planet. What made it different to anything else that had ever come into the planet’s orbit was that this new companion was artificial.
Like a sleeping giant, the artefact orbited quietly in a slow orbit around a large moon blanketed by a thick, hazy, orange coloured atmosphere. The moon was the largest in the solar system with a diameter of over five thousand kilometres.
Silent and almost dormant, huge energies lay quiescent within the artefact ready to be released. The only activity was to hide itself from observers. It kep
t the moon between itself and the inhabited third planet of the solar system at all times. Bending light and other electromagnetic radiation around itself and suppressing gravitational perturbations that would have disturbed the orbit of the moon it orbited, it kept itself concealed from even the most diligent of observers.
The artefact had been waiting for nearly four hundred years for the return of its sole occupant. At last, the signal was received to prepare for the return, their assignment on the third planet from the star almost complete. Internal systems that had been on standby for centuries came back to life again.
Multiple AI systems woke up, running test and diagnostic routines, re-establishing long dormant communication channels, checking for and installing updates. The AI’s initiated repairs and maintenance in preparation for the return. Chemical, mechanical and biological environment control and recycling systems were brought back online. The atmosphere throughout the vast structure was refreshed and filtered. Cleaning bots were dispatched to every corner of the structure, removing the dust and the debris of ages.
Maintenance drones were released to test and repair or replace, every hatchway, every seal and every component from the tiniest screw, up to the massive doors to the main hold and the huge engine and field generators of the propulsion and defensive systems.
Mining drones were released to scoop up ice and dust fragments from the planet’s rings and further afield to its other moons to gather minerals and metals. Great factories went into action to separate, grade and refine the newly mined materials and prepare to manufacture whatever was required.
Weapons systems were checked and updated and test simulations run. They couldn’t be field tested of course. Their effects were so devastating that they couldn’t possibly go unnoticed.
Now the artefact was fully prepared, it waited like an empty city for the return of its population. Its single inhabitant would soon return.
To Work
Mark arrived at the bus stop five minutes early, as usual, for the seven twenty-five bus into the city centre.
The bus arrived on time. It usually did now that all the buses were driverless, and he settled into his usual seat. He looked around at his fellow passengers. The usual ones, all sitting in their usual seats and as usual, all looking as equally grey and dead-eyed as he felt. “I wonder if the apocalypse has happened while no-one was looking and we are all zombies.” He remembered the zombies he had seen in World War Z on Netflix last week and they were a lot livelier than he and his fellow passengers. And they probably had more interesting and fulfilled lives. “Lucky bastards.”
Mark knew he had to do something with his life before this became the fixed pattern of dreary sameness and loneliness until he died or retired.
Perhaps he would be lucky and die young. He sighed and reflected that he had the same thought nearly every day over the years, but nothing ever changed.
Still, today was Thursday and that meant that he would have Sally helping him. That was something to look forward to.
The drizzle had stopped by the time the bus arrived at his stop, dead on time at eight fifteen, giving him fifteen minutes to do the ten minute walk to the office.
Mark walked up the steps to the IFG (International Finance Group) offices and through the over large and slightly shabby reception area. He gave Rajesh, the security guard at the front desk, a nod on the way through and received a grunt from him in return.
As he made his way to his desk in the IT department, he noticed he was one of the first in the office as usual. Most of his colleagues had a fairly relaxed attitude towards punctuality. There was a lot of buzz in the office nowadays – at least, there was when everyone turned up. There were so many interesting and challenging projects being run at the moment and more new initiatives coming up. Mark had been hoping to get on the Agile Office project team, but when he went to stay with his parents at their retirement home in the Algarve last year, two weeks of boredom and nagging in the sun, he came back to find that he was on the Paperless Office project team.
The initial part of the project was interesting. They defined, specified and installed all the hardware and software for the project but once that was completed, the Digitisation of Legacy Document’s part of the project was designated as low priority. That part of the project was to sort and prepare the enormous archive of old legacy documents the company had accumulated over the decades. The good news was that Mark was made Project Leader. The bad news was that the Project consisted of one person – Mark. However, he was allocated two days a week assistance from General Admin and he found himself working with Sally.
Sally was considered to be completely useless and mostly a liability at every job she had been given in the company. She had managed to offend everyone she had worked with, but she always did it with a smile. In fact, she had such a cheery disposition that despite all her shortcomings she was generally well liked.
Although potentially quite attractive, Sally managed to hide it with too much badly applied makeup. She had thick black framed and unfashionable glasses with tinted lenses and wore her mousy coloured hair in a shoulder length style that would have been more at home in the nineteen sixties. She appeared to totally lack any idea of colour coordination and seemed to know just enough about fashion sense to get it consistently wrong. To top it off, her clumsiness was legendary.
Despite all of this, Mark liked having her around for the two days a week that she was seconded to him. She was always cheery as she blundered through the dusty archives and although she never seemed to achieve much that was useful, she was always happy to make him tea whenever he asked. It mostly reached him without being spilt or yet another mug being smashed.
Sally was also the only person he saw during the working day once he descended into the sub-basement where all the documents were stored.
Mark’s job as Digitisation of Legacy Documents Project Leader was to sort the files into groups ready for digitisation. This really wasn’t IT department work but had been tacked on to the project to finish it off.
Sorting out the International Finance Group’s hard copy documents since they took over British and Commonwealth Financial Developments Plc in 2007 was easy. Nice tidy files of A4 paper in filing boxes were quickly taken to the scanning operation in General Administration for scanning and shredding. But the building had once been the headquarters for British and Commonwealth and held all the historical documents accumulated since its predecessors first started business as goldsmiths and money lenders in sixteen forty two. Winchester had still been an important City in the early seventeenth century and as the company grew it somehow managed to avoid moving its headquarters to London. During its growth and evolution, the company had bought and sold land throughout the British Empire, providing development finance, insurance and also developing commercial and residential properties. This meant that amongst the archives were documents of historical interest, including many very old handwritten pages of varying size, as well as maps and plans of all sizes and conditions.
There was a lot of paper.
Mark wondered what he had done in a previous life to deserve this. The tediousness of the task just added to his general dissatisfaction with life.
As Mark approached his desk Terry Mason, his team leader, called him over to his cubicle and asked him to sit down.
“How is the archive project going?” He asked.
“Oh great,” Replied Mark. “It’s stimulating, challenging, I never know what’s going to happen next, and it’s really stretching my skills and experience to keep control over it.”
“No, seriously,” Said Terry. “I know it’s tedious and it probably shouldn’t really be part of the Paperless Office project but as it is, it has to be done and someone has to do it.”
“But why me? All I did was go on two weeks holiday and I came back to find this dumped on me!”
“As I said,” Responded Terry, “Someone has to do it and that someone is you. Look, I’m sorry that you’ve been landed with
this but you were between projects and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, how much longer do you estimate that it will take you to finish?”
“At the rate we’re going, we might finish before I die of old age. It depends on how long I live. Can’t we just pass this on to General Admin, or at least turn it into a joint project and get some more of their people on it?”
“No, sorry, it stays with us. Not my decision. That was decided way above my pay grade.”
“How about letting me have Sally full time to help. I would have time to train her to be useful and that would half the time needed to get it finished.”
“You would probably have more luck training a seal to be useful. Anyway, the only reason you have got Sally at all is because she causes too much damage in every other job she does and it gives General Admin a break from her for two days a week. But they have to justify staff allocations and there is no way that you will get any more of her time. I’m a bit surprised that you aren’t begging me to get rid of her. She seems to drive everyone else she works with nuts.”
Mark sighed. It was true that she did cause some chaos on the days she was there, but on balance more got done on the days she was there than on the days when she wasn’t, and if it wasn’t for her coming down to work with him, he wouldn’t see anyone while at work from one week to another. “She is a real help and while I would prefer to have someone a bit more,” he paused, reflectively, “ ’normal’, helping, she is better than nothing.”
“Sorry Mark, but that’s not going to change. There’s nothing I can do about it and we are both stuck with it.”
As Mark got up and left his office, Terry sighed, thinking “I’d rather have Mark doing something more useful. He’s intelligent and hard working, unlike some of the team, but although he has a bit of a moan about being stuck with the archiving project, at least he won’t kick up a fuss. If he had more backbone, he’d have my job by now. Hell, he’d probably be the UK IT Director!”
Mark thought that Terry did look genuinely sorry that he was stuck with the project, but he knew that he wouldn’t do anything about it. As usual, he would just have to get on with it.
Unwilling From Earth Page 1
