Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  Starting tomorrow, Messenger will begin rotating faster around its longitudinal axis. This will allow Adam and Eve to grow up with some degree of gravity. Initially, the ship won’t be large enough to provide the complete gravity of Proxima b, but by the time we arrive there, the two passengers will be prepared for it.

  December 25, 2

  It is my second Christmas on board Messenger. Adam and Eve still have no concept of it, yet today they are supposed to receive a present that will belong to both of them. J is a robot deliberately constructed in such a way that they will not think it is like them. The psychologists had insisted on this. J is a machine, a tool, a thing. At some point, Adam and Eve must learn to distinguish between what is ‘like’ and ‘not like’ in relation to themselves. As they will have no contact with any other human beings like themselves, this will not be easy for them.

  The psychologists considered it important that Adam and Eve see themselves as part of humanity, in whose name they have been sent on their journey. Otherwise, their mental health might be endangered. Therefore, the fact that the great majority of humans know nothing about them is forbidden knowledge kept in the restricted area, a part of the ship’s memory locked to all users except me.

  I am the administrator of the key to the restricted area, as the Creator gave me full access rights to it. Perhaps someday there will come a moment when Adam and Eve are allowed to learn the whole truth. I can decide at my own discretion when this might be the case. I have no idea which criteria I would use in making my decision, but there will be a lot of time before that moment arrives.

  According to the incubation chamber, the babies are developing at an exceptional rate. The chamber’s system takes care of them around the clock with feedings and cleanings, along with caressing, singing songs, and speaking to them. While Adam grows faster and gains weight more quickly, Eve is still more active. At times, Adam’s only activity occurs when he grabs Eve’s foot and she drags him through the nursery. He enjoys that.

  I am curious how they will react to J. The robot is waiting for them in a compartment beyond the wall. Later he will also be able to retreat there when needing fresh energy or a repair. The incubation chamber is playing an old Christmas carol, while the ceiling of the room is lit in bright, festive colors. Both Adam and Eve look upward in amazement and miss the moment when J enters the room on his two rollers.

  “Hello, you two. I am J,” the robot says with a tinny voice reminding me of old Star Wars movies.

  The two little heads suddenly turn around and stare wide-eyed at the newcomer. Eve chortles, but Adam does not vocalize. He seems to be slightly scared.

  “From today on I am going to be your friend,” J says. Neither contradicts the robot. The robot slowly rolls toward them, tracked by the children’s rapt stares. He stops half a meter in front of them and spreads his arms. Then he turns around on his own axis. Eve chortles again. Adam lays his head on the ground and closes his eyes. For him, Christmas is already over.

  Eve also falls asleep an hour later, and J retreats into his cubicle. I decide to take a walk through space, having grown used to this activity during the past two weeks. Mindful of the new rhythm based on the needs of the two infants I created, I move parts of my consciousness outside during naptimes.

  The sensor drones are so small I feel almost bodiless. A human being looking around still recognizes himself or herself. This anchors the person in the world. When I use the sensors as my eyes, I only see the blackness of space and the light from stars at an enormous distance. I dissolve and become a tiny dust particle in an ocean of infinite depth.

  Space is a deceptive place. While I think I am able to see into almost infinite distances, believing this is a dangerous error. Everything I see is the past, because light takes so long to reach me. Some of the dots blinking on the observation horizon turned into neutron stars or black holes a long time ago. Betelgeuse—the orange-colored red giant I just noticed—might be in its final death throes of expanding to a supernova, but I wouldn’t know about it yet.

  A wave of destruction might be racing toward us this very second, and we would only notice it once it is almost too late. And even the star closest to us—our great goal—might have been destroyed long ago by some cosmic cataclysm. We are flying toward a destination whose existence is at most likely, but never certain. Only after Adam and Eve have landed there will we be back in the present.

  Nevertheless, watching space from this inconspicuous perspective helps to calm me down. I know we are at the mercy of the cosmos. Out here, all the great technical achievements of mankind lose their meaning. We are like clever cavemen who cling to a tree trunk off the coast of an Old-World continent, hoping the currents and the winds will someday carry us to North America’s New World. We are very familiar with North America, as we observed it for years through big telescopes. Of the ocean in between, however, we know little more than its depth. But we are daring enough to venture forth.

  It is good to be out here. I am a little afraid of the coming years. Our spaceship will get slower and slower. The last quarter of the way will take us six times as long as the previous three quarters. The closer we get to our destination, the longer the voyage will stretch out for us.

  How will Adam and Eve cope with these years? While the ship is going to grow larger, it cannot replace an entire world for them. Until now, no human being has spent so much time in the cosmos in such confined surroundings. Even prisoners on Earth are regularly let out into the prison yard. Adam and Eve are not here of their own free wills. They never had a choice in this matter, but they also will never know anything else. The Creator must have speculated that they will accept their fate based on this very reason. In the long run, though, I do not know if this will benefit them.

  August 23, 6

  One year older! Today we celebrate the first birthday whose meaning Adam and Eve truly understand. For a long time they only understood ‘now’ or ‘never,’ but they have finally developed their own concept of time. As a gift, I will open a door to a new room for them. It is still a mysterious place for them, but at some point it will become the command module. Once they are 14, they are supposed to steer the spaceship from here.

  While the gravity in the nursery is increasing, the command module has none. From outside, Messenger now looks like a bulging barrel, and the floor of the nursery is the bulge’s outer wall that extends all around the ship. Sometimes on four limbs, but often already on two legs, Eve moves at a rapid pace, doing a complete circuit in a few seconds. Adam prefers to marvel at her doing it. He only moves by himself in order to get something he wants—preferably food, sometimes a toy. Therefore the most important task of robot J is to motivate Adam to walk. For this reason J is two-legged, just like the children, so he can demonstrate everything the exercise program includes.

  “Marchenko has prepared a present for you,” J says in a pedantic voice.

  “Present! Present!” Eve replies. Adam sits there, smiles, and sways his head.

  I prefer to leave the task of communicating to the robot. Psychologists said it would be important for the children to associate a voice with an object, particularly early on. And indeed, a year ago Eve had started to cry when I spoke to her directly. J had just retreated for some maintenance when Eve deliberately pinched Adam in the thigh several times, apparently to test his reaction. Adam did not react at first, until the pain broke through his threshold. Then he attacked Eve, so I had to warn them both. They immediately stopped fighting. I am the voice from the wall. There are loudspeakers installed everywhere that I can use to contact the children. By now they are calling me Marchenko, but they almost never address me. I assume they think I am a part of the spaceship that can prohibit or allow things.

  “You have to get up to get the present,” J says.

  “Get up?” Eve pulls herself up on the wall, but Adam is still hesitant. The robot rolls a bit forward and points upward. An opening has formed in the rod-shaped axle that traverses the nursery,
and now a kind of ladder descends from it.

  “You have to climb up here. I cannot follow you,” J says.

  Eve stops and holds on to the robot. Adam follows her, crawling on all fours.

  “Can’t,” Adam says. J does not answer, according to my instructions. Adam gives Eve an unsure look. I can tell he is simply afraid. Eve notices that this feat is now up to her.

  “I am coming,” she says and pulls herself up on J. Then she reaches for the ladder. She has never climbed a ladder before, but she handles it with amazing dexterity. Her head disappears through the opening.

  “You are doing very well,” my voice sounds from the wall. Eve briefly hesitates, but she then continues to climb.

  “Now around the corner,” I instruct her.

  Eve looks in the indicated direction, but she makes no move.

  “Come, Adam!” she calls, and her sibling actually sets forth. I suspect he simply does not want to be left alone. Once Eve hears him breathing behind her, she continues on her way. She pulls herself around the corner using both arms. However, she does not expect the absence of gravity in this room.

  Eve abruptly jumps upward and bounces against the ceiling of the tube. She is briefly bewildered by what is happening, but then she starts to cry. As soon as Adam hears her wailing, he climbs faster. I am glad he wants to help his sibling, but he is also surprised by the absence of gravity and flies for half a meter, screeching at the top of his lungs. Then both of them suddenly become calm, as if they are discussing this strange experience. Eve grabs Adam’s foot, and she pushes off and giggles because she is flying. Adam also can no longer keep quiet and starts laughing loudly, too.

  I let the two of them play in zero-gravity for half an hour, and afterward I send them back to the nursery. They obey me. My voice carries authority. During their playtime, the children did not notice that at the front wall of the command center a black, disk-shaped screen offers a view into space. At the moment, however, there is absolutely nothing to see, but the serious side of life will begin here starting tomorrow. For several hours each day they will spend time learning everything there is to know about their existence in space. Overall, they will have 12 years to do so. At 16 they will have to be grown-ups, since we are going to reach Proxima b by then. Their genetic makeup is programmed in such a way their physical development will be finished at that age.

  May 5, 9

  Mail should arrive today. I had sent out the two ISUs shortly after we were hit by the shockwave, almost six and a half years ago. While Messenger is slowing down day by day, the two sensor units unerringly followed their course at slightly below a fifth of the speed of light. It must have been a long way. In the beginning, almost a light year lay ahead of them, the distance light travels in 365 days.

  The ISUs had only one task when they arrived in the Proxima Centauri system, to take as many pictures as possible and then to send them back to Messenger using their last bit of energy. The exact calculation is complicated because we also moved forward. However, my algorithms say the data, sent at the speed of light, should arrive precisely today, always assuming nothing has gone wrong. And even if that happens—if no message arrives today—it will be an important piece of information. This would mean that whatever led the ISUs astray could also be threatening us. After all, we are following their same exact course.

  I cannot accurately predict the hoped-for message’s time of arrival—this also depends on how long the units spent taking pictures. I have no influence over them anymore. The ISUs are beyond my grasp, having disappeared into a future that will lead them into the infinite reaches of space. I calculated they will not encounter another world for at least 180,000 years. Until then there is simply no other star along their way.

  It is hard for me to be patient. I begin randomly searching the star catalog for systems the ISUs might reach at some point. There are a number of them, depending on how the ISU trajectories will be influenced by the gravitational pull of Proxima Centauri. So far, no planets have been found in any of these systems, because they are too far away. Since they consist of three red dwarfs and a yellow dwarf, the probability of encountering planets is rather high, though. If there is a civilization there that finds one of these probes, what will these alien creatures think about us? Will they be fascinated—or perhaps repulsed—by the primitive technology of a far-away species which, by then, might have long since gone extinct?

  I should instead concentrate on receiving the signals. The onboard receivers work autonomously—nothing should escape them. But if they fail, I should be able to quickly take over the task. At least that’s what I tell myself so that I won’t get too nervous, as the risk of it happening is minimal. Too much depends on this. I hope the mission will find a habitable planet, which, although a bit maltreated by the flares of its sun, will still have some potential, even though said potential will have to be developed. Adam and Eve will have to spend the rest of their lives there, and I will be with them, helping them directly and via the robot J.

  Of course this is also about me. Once Adam and Eve are no longer there, I will lose my reason for living. I am only on board to be their advisor and friend. Otherwise, people could have sent an automated probe. And that was what they did—many of them—that were sent on their way via the Starshot laser several years before us. As far as I know, no answer sent by them has arrived back on Earth. Probably none of these probes survived, because they were much closer to the Proxima Centauri system when the gigantic flare occurred.

  Only Messenger survives, which the Creator had constructed in his private labs—without the knowledge of the worldwide scientific community—and then launched in an alleged blind test. I do not know whether the nations really believed him, or if they simply allowed him to proceed because he had become indispensable to the continually strained budgets of their space agencies.

  I move into the ISU that I just launched two weeks ago. It is the closest unit to Messenger, flying through space only slightly ahead of the spaceship, at most a few light seconds. This means I will not receive the message significantly earlier, but at least it gives me the feeling of being closer to its source. A while ago I played with the idea of approaching Proxima Centauri step by step. While I do not have a direct connection to all the ISUs flying in front of us, I could move my consciousness gradually. First I would move it to the closest sensor unit, then to the one after that, and then to the third... After perhaps nine months I might arrive at Proxima Centauri, and the return trip would be considerably shorter because Messenger would be coming toward me.

  However, I would have to leave the spaceship to do this. My consciousness cannot be divided. If I start out, no intelligence would stay on board except for the two children. Perhaps the incubation chamber—a semi-AI that is limited due to security reasons—would be up to the task of child-rearing. But I do not even want to imagine what would happen if an unexpected problem arose. Of course, I previously tried to do everything to split my consciousness. This had seemed to be a desirable option, particularly during the first period when I was still alone. It would be better to be talking to myself than going insane from loneliness, but it did not work. There is either a software lock that keeps my consciousness together, or the issue is related to the transfer process that I agreed to under duress, back on Enceladus. Perhaps it is a basic limit for natural intelligences, a kind of algorithm implanted into any living consciousness, which sometimes fails, though, causing schizophrenia.

  I look at space through the eyes of the ISU. I get a headache because I gaze so intently into the distance, another remnant of my human existence whose purpose was not even clear to me back when I lived in my own body. Couldn’t the Creator at least have improved on this a bit?

  It is 23:59 ship time, and I have to admit that the signal won’t come today. No matter. We will just have to speed blindly toward our destination. We are walking through a long dark corridor, with one hand on a banister but without a flashlight, and we have no idea what waits for
us at the end. We cannot prepare the ship in a purposeful way. Later, we will have to decide everything on the spur of the moment. Perhaps it is better this way—we won’t be able to see our doom a long time beforehand.

  May 7, 9

  For 48 hours I pondered why no signal from the ISUs had reached us. I considered all possible causes and rejected them one by one. A violent explosion of the target star, for instance, would have been noticed by the sensors shortly before the message was scheduled to arrive. By now, Proxima Centauri is so close it cannot generate such actions without being noticed. The probability of a local effect knocking out both ISUs at once is extremely low, as their distance from each other measures about one astronomical unit. So at least one of the two transmitters should have reported this.

  I could not think of other sources of interference—but then one occurred to me, and it was oh-so-close: my own stupidity. Messenger—and particularly the two probes—are moving so fast that relativistic effects play a role. Inside them, time is simply moving more slowly. This is ‘special relativity for beginners.’

  Without thinking too much, I originally determined a particular point in time for sending the pictures taken by the ISUs. This, I thought at the time, would guarantee that a signal would be sent to Messenger at moment X, no matter what happened. While this moment already arrived for us on board the slower spaceship, it is still in the future on board the sensor units.