STAR OF EPIPHANY

by OMAR FINK

  Sonny said, “Exactly. Those little balls of reserve oxygen not only save lives in space accidents, they are also responsible for greatly reducing the fatality ratios from heart attacks and strokes. Whenever the oxygen level in the blood stream gets slow enough, they start releasing their extra oxygen molecules. But our most important first line of defense is actually the skins everybody is now wearing and our jump suits and helmets. The skins were really designed for thermal and bacterial protection more than explosive decompression, but they do offer a little bit of help, including ultra violet blocking. Some of the newer models have the ability to extrude a face mask that can protect the delicate membranes there at least for a few minutes. And if you’re wearing a full jump suit, the way we always do when we’re working, the much stronger composite fabric and helmet materials offer complete protection in most cases.”

  Keel was nodding again. Sonny continued, “So, after an accident, the skin can provide enough protection to allow getting into a jump suit, and the combination of the jump suit and the respirocytes mean most folks involved in a space accident will survive not just the first hour but several more. Then it becomes a question of how much atmosphere you have left, and can your craft move toward rescue and emergency facilities in time to keep you alive. And that’s where we come in. We need fast moving craft, manned with staff training to react well under stress and emergency conditions, who can reach an accident site fast enough to provide shelter, water, and food in time to preserve life.”

  Keel asked, “So, how do we get there fast enough?”

  Sonny smiled, “We’ve put the engineers to work on that problem and they have a proposal. If somebody in need is within a few days travel of a major hab-ring, they will likely be rescued in time. It’s the ones farther out that are the biggest problem. So we need a network of life supporting stations spread out in between major habs. And they need to be able to move fast. We need to be able to live on them in between rescue operations, so we need a ring wheel, smaller but in most other aspects similar to the large rings. The larger the ring is, the more comfortable the living environment will be, but the more difficult it is to move and the more fuel is needed to propel it. The engineers are proposing a compromise where the ring-wheel has a spindle like the ones connecting the large clusters of rings, but a spindle that is detachable. That makes it much lighter and able to move faster with less fuel requirements.”

  Keel said, “I think I’m ahead of you. We live in the ring, but deploy the spindle by itself for rapid rescue ops.”

  Sonny smiled, “Yes, and we can take several crew members, oxygen, water and food and provide either repairs and/or transport to either our wheel base or the nearest large facility.”

  Keel asked, “How will the propulsion system work?”

  Sonny replied, “That’s one of the most ingenious parts of the design. The spindle will have arms at each end that can extend and retract. They will retract inside the profile of the spindle when it is moving in or out of the habitat ring, but once the spindle is clear of the ring, they will extend and provide thrusters, sensors, and grappling tools.”

  Keel said, “That’s awesome.”

  Sonny said, “And that boy-wonder you know, what’s his name?”

  Keel said, “You mean Nabith, Nabith Mehra?”

  Sonny said, “Yeah, that’s the one. He’s been pushing hard for building a network of communication and navigation hubs that have sensors designed to detect small fast moving threats at a greater distance and spread the warning faster, giving us more time to react. We can dovetail our project to deploy rescue hubs with his comm-nav-net. That means we’ll be roving around deploying his network of sensors and hubs while we establish our rescue stations at the same time.”

  Keel said, “That makes a lot of sense. I’ve already told you I’m in on this project and nothing has changed. I’m still in and even more excited. When do we start?”

  +7 years, 5 months, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

  Zorba Omega smiled and spread out his arms in greeting, “We should all thank Mr. Giger for providing this wonderful laboratory for the Professor to work in.” Professor Morgan stood nearby, alongside Ulrich Giger, Tony Azaria and Peter Anderson. A TYCHE terminal was also there.

  Zorba continued, “And we should all thank the Professor for the marvelous work he has produced here. But now is not the time for me to talk. It is the time to show. Professor, you have the floor.” He bowed his head slightly toward Professor Morgan.

  Peter interrupted, “Genaro has been in Seattle working hands on with TYCHE to crunch some big numbers for us. We couldn’t have this nearly as fast without that help. They’ve been wonderful. Of course the real credit must go to Professor Morgan.” He smiled his crooked smile and brushed a few locks of white hair away from his ear. He said, “Professor, this is your baby.”

  Professor Morgan cleared his throat, “Yes, yes, thank you indeed Mr. Giger for allowing me to use your lab. The Directed Matter Junction, or DMJ as we call it, is like a magic box. We don’t pretend to understand exactly how everything inside it works, but we know what will come out. The problem lies with quantum mechanics, which is really some mumbo jumbo black magic garbage. Quantum Mechanics basically says we don’t know what goes on in here, so we can just make shit up and sell it to anybody because they can’t refute it. Well, I stand here to refute it.” He glanced over at Zorba who was frowning.

  The Professor said, “Zorba always tells me to skip this part about Quantum Mechanics but it’s important. Quantum Mechanics worked out the mathematics to accurately describe what happens in the real world at the observable level. But there are clearly levels of operation that are not yet observable, and that is where Quantum Mechanics goes off the rails. It tries to fill in the missing pieces with a boat load of hogwash about probability states. What a bunch of crap.”

  Zorba interrupted, “Professor, please tell us about the DMJ.”

  The Professor cleared his throat again, “Okay. The sermon on Quantum Mechanics will have to wait. But you really should hear it. It’s important. Anyway… the DMJ has parts of it that operate below the observable level. We simply don’t know what happens there, in spite of what Quantum theory tells you, which is quite wrong. We have been able to convince these non-observable parts to collaborate to manipulate energy and matter in new ways. In the end, this allows us to morph one form of energy into another and one form of matter into another. That is an extremely simplistic description, but it is accurate. There are some limitations and some somewhat extreme requirements. The DMJ needs a lot of energy. We expect it will work much better in the vacuum and zero-G environment of space. But we can demonstrate it here today, and we shall.”

  Professor Morgan walked over to a table top covered with equipment and pointed at a small black concave cylindrical object that flared out at both ends and was connected to some wires and tubes on one end. At the other end of the object, a thin sparkling thread was slowly being ejected from the object. He said, “You are among the first to actually see a diamond nanothread being extruded. We are injecting graphene powder, electricity, and information on one end, and out the other end comes the diamond thread. This thread is much stronger than your current carbon nanotube based ribbons. We think we can further improve it to include superconductivity that should allow energy to be transmitted up and down the thread to power the climber cars. This may also mean the climber cars can abandon their mechanical climbing process and use linear magnetic accelerators instead. All in all, if we can do these things, you’ll see dramatic increases in performance levels on the space elevators. If we can’t do anything more than just produce the diamond nanothread, which you can see before you now, you’ll at least get the increases you need to meet your evacuation targets.” He paused and looked around the room.

  There was silence. The other men appeared stunned, except for Zorba who smile broadly. Zorba finally broke the silence, “Professor, I want to remind you of my standing offer to come work for me after you are thr
ough teaching everybody how this works and how to best use it.”

  +7 years, 6 months, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

  Ulrich Giger stood in front of the wall of glass gazing out over the vista of Lake Zurich beyond. He turned and stepped back to the massive circular conference table and took a seat. He extended his hand in a welcoming gesture, “I think you all know each other: Peter Anderson, Tony Azaria, Professor Morgan. Thank you Professor for the wonderful demonstration of the DMJ you gave us recently. But now we need to discuss how we can actually use it. I think the three of you have worked out most of the issues, so please clue me in.”

  Peter said, “I’ll go first. The professor has outlined the power, material, and information inputs that are needed. There are no show stoppers there. The biggest issue seems to be we need more time to test the thread extrusion in zero-G and vacuum to find out how much that will improve the process, but at the same time, our highest priority needs to be immediate deployment to get the elevator lifting schedule back on track. We just need to work out a plan to optimize doing both at the same time, while allowing improvements to be upgraded into the existing elevators. That shouldn’t be difficult.” He shrugged.

  Tony said, “I think we can let the Professor and Peter work out this schedule. We need to get it done in the next several days, then hand it off to the HU engineering team to finalize it and implement it. I don’t see any impediments there.”

  Ulrich asked, “How much improvement can we anticipate in lifting capacity over the next six months?”

  Tony replied, “We’re currently maxed out at around five hundred tons per cable per day. We plan to stop building new elevators near the end of next year, because the returns diminish as times runs out. That will leave us with only about three billion people lifted off the planet by the time the comet train returns. It will take time to upgrade the ribbons, but with a steady phase in plan, we think we can reach seven hundred fifty tons per day by the end of the year, one thousand tons per day six months later, fifteen hundred tons per day six months after that and so on. If the space based tests yield the increases, we expect, we can continue to ramp up the lifting tonnage until we reach twenty five hundred tons per day in year ten and that will give us a schedule resulting in nearly eight billion people lifted by the return of the comet. It’s not the full eight billion, but we also know some people intend to stay here, so we should be very close to getting everybody off the planet that wants to leave.” He sighed deeply and added, “And that’s the first time we’ve been able to see that daylight at the end of the tunnel.”

  Ulrich nodded, “That is very good indeed.”

  +7 years, 7 months, HABITAT-81, AU 2.3

  Kazimieras Jagiello stood in the middle of a workspace, wearing an exoskeleton that was currently formed into a crouching position, allowing his tall frame to maintain that posture with no effort. The black exoskeleton formed boots over his feet, ran up the back of his legs as supports, widened into a backplate and neck collar, and ran supports down his arms. In the spots where there was no black, his gray second generation under-skin showed through. It was sheer enough to show the rippled muscles of his abdomen in the front.

  A software assistant voice announced, “Scotty will address the Miner’s Guild in one minute.” Kaz watched a bot finish assembling another bot device, and instructed it to pause work. He adjusted his exoskeleton to lean back into a more comfortable position and said, “Room command, wall screen on.” The nearby wall lit up with the scene from a meeting conference.

  Scotty sat at the head of a table and began speaking, “For those of you who may not know me personally, my name is Augustus Scott, but everybody just calls me ‘Scotty’. I’m here today representing the leadership committee for our newly formed Miner’s Guild. The purpose of the Guild is to maintain standards of quality and performance that will enhance our market positions as a community. To that end, we have proposed purchasing HABITAT-81 from Humanity United and using it to create a base of operations for miners. We have obtained a tentative price range from HU and have secured commitments from enough of you to make this happen. We have offered variable investment levels with ownership benefits, and profit sharing balanced accordingly. We have a plan to form a credit union funded by members that can offer loans to help miners buy in to the habitat ring, and make getting started purchases of mining equipment.” Scotty paused for a moment.

  Scotty resumed, “For those of you who have not yet visited this ring, it is a Class C ring, five hundred meters radius, turning at 1.32 rpm, with sixty standard floors, and more above for low-G storage and assembly areas. It is currently known as ‘HABITAT-81’ by HU, and we are proposing to rename it to ‘MORIA’. This ring is nearly identical in size to HAB-32. Many of you were on that hab while in transit to outer locations. It is currently located near AU 2.3 and moving outward to a final orbit near AU 2.7 and the associated Kirkwood gap. This will put it near the center of general asteroid mass and also right on the ‘frost line’ enabling searching for either rocks with frozen volatiles or not depending on which way you go.”

  Scotty looked around the faces in the room with him, then looked back into the video point, “At the end of this session, we’ll engage in a question and answer process including time delays for those who are not nearby. We want to answer all your questions. We’ll make all the contracts and other materials available to you. We have a virtual tour that allows you to visit the entire ring however you wish. In the video I think you’ll notice that although this ring is architecturally the same as most other C class rings, the interior furnishings are state of the art. Everything is connected and most surfaces have display tech embedded. That means you can use any wall or surface as a screen or monitor. The restaurants here have the best synthesizer capability that is being built anywhere.”

  Scotty said, “Okay, let’s start taking questions from the queue.”

  Kaz murmured at the wall, “Room command, volume low, captions on.” and the volume dropped away but the conversation could still be followed in a text stream at the bottom. Several hours later, when the discussion was completed for the time, Scotty opened up the voting stream. Kaz noted his vote in favor of the proposal, and authenticated it for the blockchain voting record.

  +7 years, 8 months, HABITAT-107, AU 2.1

  Lee Martin smiled broadly, “This is Lee Martin, coming to you from an orbit near the Kirkwood Gap that is 2.1 AU from the Sun. I am now on the ring called Habitat-107, which was recently completed out here in the Asteroid Belt. This habitat is scheduled to move out to the Kirkwood Gap that is at 3.3 AU. In the process, the plans are that it will continue the building process to replicate itself, and one of the two rings will circle back toward the inner edge of the belt in order to take on more people in the migration process.”

  Lee ran her fingers through her hair, “You know, this life style out here has been fairly nomadic for the last few years, and while I’m sure that doesn’t appeal to everybody, it means things stay exciting and dynamic, and I’m always plugged right in to the latest new technology and information. For me, that’s fun.” She smiled again.

  Lee continued, “And today I have some great new technology to tell you about. It’s called the DMJ and that stands for Distributed Matter Junction. It was invented recently back on Earth, and it’s going to change a lot of things. For now, it’s most important for improving the space elevators that are lifting people off of Earth to the safety of space and habitats like this one I live in. We all know we’ve had a little over ten years to get this done, and we’re now about seven and a half years into that countdown. We also know that the elevator project is behind schedule, and the way it’s been going, it wasn’t going to be able to lift everybody to safety on time.”

  Lee frowned, “We’re just now finding out how far behind schedule we’ve been. If nothing had changed, it’s possible that only three billion of the eight billion people on Earth would have lifted off to safety before the Earth is destroyed by the comet fragments. T
his was not good.”

  Lee smiled, “But the DMJ changes all that, and the news is good. The DMJ has the ability to alter molecular structure in ways that were never possible before. And it has made possible the manufacture of a new stronger fiber that is being called diamond nanothread. This diamond thread is much stronger than the carbon nanotubes that have been used up to now, and they can hold more weight, meaning more people can be lifted by the same number of elevators. They are still doing some testing, but it looks like everybody who wants to leave Earth will be able to before it is destroyed.”

  +7 years, 11 months, HABITAT-58, AU 2.5

  Nabith Mehra spoke into the air in front of him, “TYCHE, open data files for project “Hallway”.

  TYCHE responded, “The data files are open and ready to use, Nabith.”

  Nabith said, “Show me all of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.” The wall monitor in front of him complied with a large ring of small dots.

  Nabith said, “Show me time based motion.” The dots on the display did not seem to move.

  TYCHE suggested, “Perhaps you should speed it up.”