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By
nulll
on
09-03-2007, 10:07 AM
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| chapter 01 - slinghsot .01 - slingshot The view outside was simply breathtaking. Despite I had been looking at it for the entire final stage of our approach, which lasted for over twenty-two years now, it still amazed me continuously. On Neyon’Moru’s map of the known 3D universe, it was simply a light green dot with a small red star called G634-XJT-A. Light green, meaning it’s a class 3-alpha sized galaxy and the red star indicating its age, being very old in galaxy terminology, and its general shape. Due to its age, the spiral arms it surely once had, filled with countless star clusters, had slowly evaporated in a huge light purple gas cloud, its diameter several times larger than that of the galaxy itself. The stars, planets and more denser gas and dust clouds of various colors were all contained within a relatively small, flattened sphere with a equatorial radius estimated at 38.4 thousand lightyears. Several star-filled bulges on the surface of this sphere, perhaps only a few thousand lightyears high, hinted of the now gone spirals. Over time, these would fade as well, leaving a perfectly smooth ellipsoid, growing smaller and smaller as its contents get drawn inwards towards a central super massive black hole. I tried to imagine what the galaxy would look like, nearing the moment of its inevitable demise. Would it simply continue growing smaller and eventually quietly disappear or would the overcrowding of the centre of the galaxy cause rapid implosion, sending shockwaves through the outer layers and send unsuspecting star systems hurtling into deep space? I have no idea, but I’m sure Neyon’Moru’s advanced knowledge of astrophysics and complex dynamic systems could come up with a simulation of the end of this galaxy. I told myself to remember to ask her about it one day, but for now I just wanted to enjoy the scenery. I was hoping I could see the central black hole in action though, a sight to which I was treated only once before. I remember it very well—of course I do, thanks to the artificial expansions and upgrades of what's left of my once-human brain, in which I can now store massive amounts of data. All I needed to do was focus a bit on what it looked like and the A.I. subroutines would pick up and understand the signals in my brain and look up the relevant entries in my memory banks. Within fractions of a millisecond, a wealth of images and general information about the active galaxy was available in the semi-organic short-term memory. One glance at the data told me I had stored it pure and unfiltered, which was a good thing, a rare event like that had to be stored in the highest resolution available. If I wanted I could see every single star and planet, even every asteroid, no matter how small, present in the galaxy, but instead I quickly programmed a visual filter and limited the bandwidth of the signal to emulate what human eyes with all their limitations and flaws would see. And there it was, active galaxy H101-BFD-A, as if it were right in front of me in all its complex, colorful glory, as if I was looking at it right now. Its majestic brightness and beauty washed over me and for a few moments I could do nothing more than just look at it and absorb every aspect of this wonder of the universe. I don’t remember it having such an impact on me the first time I saw it. It was good to feel something like this again. We came across H101 because it was near the 4th waypoint of our journey, the first one outside the borders of our home galaxy, G751-LNA-X, or the Xyth galaxy as we like to call it. The exit point of the trip trough higher-dimensional space dropped us off a little over 450 thousand lightyears away from H101. Measuring over 225 thousand lightyears in diameter, it was one of the biggest spiral galaxies I had seen so far, not including the rare class X giant galaxies. Predominantly deep red with bright blue areas dotted throughout the spiral arms, most likely the birth places of new stars. Filaments of various colors, filled with yellow and older orange stars and dark lanes of dust crossed trough the galaxy, seemingly random, creating a complex tapestry. H101’s own rotation was directed away from us and at the time we arrived it's inclination was about sixty degrees from our point of view. Towering above and below the galaxy and perpendicular to it, were massive jets of gas and matter speeding away at almost the speed of light, wavering outwards as they moved further away from the central black hole and its accretion disk the jets originated from. Due to the galaxy its rotation, the jets were curved and created gigantic, bright blue arcs, stretching several hundred thousand lightyears above and even behind us. For our next waypoint we had to find a new entry into higher-dimensional space and the data we had on this area led us to a place 118 lightyears away, a trip which took over thirteen hundred years and during which we gathered a lot of data to update our knowledge on black holes and active galaxies in general. I think our arrival at waypoint four was about seven hundred to eight hundred years into our journey. Despite being able to store large amounts of data, and as such having near-perfect memories of what we encountered so far on our trip, I always had trouble remembering how long ago these memories were stored. I guess this has to do with the fact that the human mind was simply not made to have memories that stretched over such long periods of time. I could clearly see the data belonging to the first moments after I received the upgrades to my brains and the additional artificial memory expansions, a large chunk of numbers and processor commands at the start of the first memory databanks, containing images, sounds, impressions and so on from those days. Sadly, a fairly high percentage of that data could no longer be interpreted by my brain, nor by the artificial processors, since back then, I still had to learn how to use the new equipment, and how to control the processors. At the same time, the A.I. of those processors had to learn how my brain worked. It possessed basic understanding of the workings of a human brain and it could, up a certain extend, collect data from my senses and by cross-referencing that data with what my natural memory stored, the A.I. slowly learned how to convert the multitude of signals into images, sounds, and so on. This learning process of both of us resulted in a lot of ‘trial and error’ data, a garbled mess of random numbers, codes and commands that meant nothing. Even after all this time, the A.I. is still learning but it's efficiency is now at 99.99973105 percent and still rising, and very little of the data—my memories, my experiences, actually—is corrupt these days, and there are plenty error detection and advanced correction subroutines which can turn the majority these few errors in useful data anyway. Most of my first two memorybanks were filled with nonsensical data, if I wanted, I could delete all that and use the free space for new entries, but those banks also contained the entire learning process of the A.I. and although all the processor programs are now hard-coded in the chips in the remnants of my skull, it’s good to have a backup… just in case something happens and the entire process has to be started all over. More backups of this data, as well as of all the experiences I accumulated thus far were also stored on Firewing and on Tanyu’Lana, as well as in Neyon’Moru’s databanks. Just in case. A large portion of the tri-bit sub-dynamic data belonged to impressions of the great Coalition War, only about one fourth of it was useful, but I also had the pure combat data stored by Firewing, as well as what’s left of this event in my natural memory. Over the many, many years, a lot of those memories faded and many association-pathways no longer existed in my brain, leaving me with my own black holes in my mind, slowly devouring my past. Neyon’Moru survived those wars as well, be it with less injuries than I did and fortunately, time doesn't have an impact on her memories. I’ll have to ask her to tell me about it, again, one day. I pushed away the data, poured in the short-term memory by the A.I. as it reacted to my ponderings of the war, by preparing what we had stored on the event. I’ll have another look at it later and didn’t feel like thinking about the war and the damage it had done. Although the A.I. was very limited in understanding and processing feelings and emotions, there was still a lot of pain which I recall personally...when it came to this particular event, I didn’t need help remembering and feeling that pain again...or rather, feeling it still. Some memories just didn’t want to fade or perhaps I didn’t want them to fade away just yet. I gave myself a few more moments before focusing again on what I was trying to figure out : how much time had passed since we saw the H101 relativistic jets… and how much time since we left Xyth galaxy...and how old I am. After the Coalition War, there was no real need for combat pilots anymore, so I spend a while just flying around, exploring the outer regions of our galaxy, at least, so I thought, I don’t seem to recall much of that time. Then I met Neyon’Moru again and the rest of the Tanyu and Neyon family. I think that must have been four or five years after the end of the war, and we set off on this journey not much later. We had very accurate data on the first three waypoints so we found those very quickly and passed them within the next ten to twelve years if I remember correctly. Then came the waypoint near H101, worth over three hundred years of traveling. The following seven waypoints took more and more time to find due to dimensional drift. We expected that how further away from Xyth we traveled how less accurate our data on the location of the higher-dimensional shortcuts would become. Seven hundred years for waypoint five, I think. Perhaps eighteen for number six. A lot of data belonging to waypoint seven, I wonder what it’s all about since my natural memories of waypoint seven are limited and vague, no way to tell how much time it took to find it, could easily be up to five thousand years or even more. The time spend on finding either waypoint eight or nine was relatively short, I’d say even shorter than waypoint five, so probably four hundred to five hundred years. A quick look at the more recent entries in the memorybanks told me that the data from waypoints eight to ten was concentrated in only a small area, this could mean that all three waypoints only took a small amount of time to find...or there was simply no much worth remembering. I do believe either nine or ten took us a very long time… twelve thousand years? Fifteen thousand? Twenty thousand? Or was that number eight? Then nine must be the short one, but what about the tenth waypoint? I have no idea, there is no way to see when a certain memory was stored. Each entry has an address within the databanks, which is related to the order in which it entry was stored and association codes, linking entries on a certain event together, but these numbers were almost completely useless when it came to figuring out time spans and if a lot of data was stored in a short amount of time or a very small amount of data stored over the course of hundreds of years, it seemed like these numbers made even less sense. I gave up on browsing through the memorybanks and realized I had to find a way to store future data with an indication of time or age and try to figure out how old the contents of my mind was, both natural and artificial. If only I could set up a timeline from now on and link it to new memories I could perhaps extrapolate back in time. But the results wouldn't be very accurate, more like completely useless. Xyth’s calendar would be of help, but I couldn’t remember when the Coalition War started and ended… I can’t believe I forgot that. Was it 17.3 AX? 27.3 AX? Can’t be more than twenty but I knew there was a seven somewhere in that date. With an accurate AX date I could extrapolate towards the future and cross-reference with a data-address based backwards extrapolation… Perhaps Firewing could be of help, unlike me, he stores data in regular, continuous way, though there have been large gaps over the past two thousand years… or the past twenty thousand years, whatever… and I didn’t know Firewing’s exact build and commissioning dates anymore. Either way, that data would only allow me to accurately transcribe my past for a period of no more than twenty years. “Neyon’Moru, how long has it been since we started this mission?” “In Earth-years or Xyth-years?” “Good question.” Although I spend most of my life in a Xyth-calendar based environment, I grew up on Earth, and for some reason I could never get used to the Xyth-year which is about 1.3343 Earth-years. On top of that, all ‘lightyear’ and derived notions which were based on the old Julian calendar stayed in use on Xyth, and I still use those today in my calculations. “Let’s stick with Earth-years for now, that will be easier for me. We should come up with a new standard, though.” “Creating a new standard is best postponed till we finish our research on elemental 3D time units, else we have to switch standards again once research is complete. To answer your question, 170.229,4 years have passed since we received the mission details.” Her answer shocked me and for a few moments I was stunned and could do nothing more than repeat the number in my head over and over again, as if it were a complex equation instead of just a number and I was trying to find a small error in it that caused it to return faulty results. This can’t be right, it’s not logical. That number is almost ten times higher then what I estimated to be the maximum amount of time that could have passed since we left Xyth. A large part of me simply refused to accept that number. “That can’t be right.” It sounded a bit like a question and I was hoping she’d agree with me and come up with a smaller number. “Perhaps…” But what was I going to say against one of the most intelligent beings I’ve met so far? That she made a common math error or used the wrong standard somehow… that would be near impossible. “Due to minimal fluctuations in the energy streams in my circuits caused by the ever-changing gravity fields outside which can’t be neutralized completely by my grav-shields, there could be small irregularities in my artificial time calculators. But I have three separate modules running in different locations so the grav-effect is minimized. This error is estimated to be no more than one nanosecond for every 17.85 trillion years passed. Since you asked me to give you an answer in years, this error is insignificant” “No, that’s not what I meant.” All previous doubts I had about the correctness of this number were now gone. It’s impossible that Moru made a mistake. The problem lied elsewhere, most likely with my human nature, or more exactly, the human nature I had so many years ago… tens of thousands of years ago, it now seemed. “It’s just that so much more time has passed than I deemed ever to be possible. I don’t doubt the correctness of your calculations, but somehow it doesn’t seem right. I mean, it’s hundred seventy thousand years. For humans, who rarely lived longer than hundred years, that’s an insane amount of time… even for me who has been around so long. It simply doesn't feel like hundred seventy thousand to me…” “It doesn’t seem all that much to me, either. We’ve been lucky with the amount of additional traveling we had to do thus far due to dimensional drift. My first estimated numbers were about twice as high. Of course, we’re not at the end of our journey yet. I’ve also done missions and travels before that took a lot longer than hundred seventy thousand years, then again, time is not much of an issue to me and you probably experience it in a very different way than I do. It’s most likely due to the way your memory works, both natural and artificial. Now that you can more or less choose what you want to remember, there might be large gaps in your timeline. If you have no memories of a certain period of time, you have no real proof that said period actually existed for you. On top of that, out here in deep space, days, months, years or even centuries are considered nothing more than short moments, and there is no day and night caused by a nearby star for instance to remind you of the passing of time. Instead we have galaxies that take millions of years for one rotation.” “You have a point, I don't have a biological clock anymore either, only several processors in my head running at such insane speeds I can’t use them to get an idea of how much time is passing.” Life became quite different after I managed to lose my body, a lot of things changed drastically. No need anymore for sleep or food. Perception of the universe around me, no longer by means of limited human senses, but by near-perfect artificial sensors, seeing and hearing things I never imagined to exist with mind boggling resolution. I traded in taste, smell and touch for a new sense, combining these in an unparalleled awareness of my surroundings. “The fact that you didn’t perceive those hundred seventy thousand years like a human, or probably any other short-lived self-aware entity would, is perhaps a good thing. On the scale of the universe, even a million years is short and if you want to be a successful explorer or if you only want to see even the smallest part of the universe, you’ll want to live longer than hundred years.” “True, still, I’d like to keep track of how much time has passed. Do you think there’s a way for me to label the entries in my memorybanks with a date, based on the start of the Xyth-calendar, but measuring time in Earth-years? Despite the amazing complexity of the A.I. chips I only have very limited editing possibilities myself. Other than deleting entries or making backups and changing priorities in the association link chain, I can’t make any changes to the contents of the memorybanks.” “Easiest way is to link up with one of my consoles, I can program it so you can manually add extra alphanumerical data to the entries. I can also re-program the A.I. itself so it gives you more control over what gets stored, but that might take a while to do. Right now I’m using all my resources to calculate the slingshot trajectory, though.” “No problem, I’ll use the console for now. How long till we reach the periapsis of the target star cluster?” “Forty-three days. We will be experiencing increasing turbulence due to grav-field fluctuations as we get closer.” The last entry point back into 3D space landed us about eight thousand lightyears away from the edge of the G634 galaxy. If we were to travel to our next waypoint, we would have to go through parts of this galaxy, which would slow us down significantly. Moru calculated, that using the galaxy's mass, we could not only avoid passing through it, but we could also set up a slingshot trajectory, which would dramatically increase the ship’s speed and increase the efficiency of the limited amounts of fuel we had on board. It would still take us a long time to reach the next waypoint, about twenty-three thousand light years away, measured in a straight line from the last entry point. The new trajectory, bringing us very close to a star cluster at the border of the galaxy, added about five thousand seven hundred lightyears but should increase our speed in such a way it would take us less time to travel the longer distance. The calculations needed to figure out the most efficient trajectory were so complex, that Moru had to pause her research on elemental 3D time units and on 4D travel and engine optimizations, which were taking up 83.71 percent of all here computing and A.I. resources, so she could finish them without us having to slow down and risk missing the periapsis of the target star cluster. As a result, for the first stage of our approach, we simply flew straight towards the center of galaxy, allowing it’s mass to accelerate us up to 0.331c. We traveled a little less than eight thousand lightyears in about forty thousand years. At least, that’s what I’m guessing, it only seemed like we started our approach a few months ago. During the second stage we started to bank to the right, preparing to temporarily enter into orbit around the center of mass of G634. Along this orbit we would also temporarily enter an orbital path around the target star cluster and at that very moment we would start moving away from the galaxy, using the star cluster’s rotation around the center of mass of G634 to basically shoot us into deep space again. And that moment was almost there. I was hoping we had the spare time to travel trough the outer regions of G634 instead of flying around them. Although I could zoom in and observe planets, stars and nebulae as if I were close to them, it's very different from being in a ship and flying by closely or even through, feeling the gravity pull at the ship and its pilot, dodging stellar flares and asteroids. I remember playing around in the grav-fields of massive stars and planets, trying to set a new personal speed record or simply trying to get a nice view on astronomical objects. I remember flying through dense nebulae of various colors, with swirling vortices of interstellar gas and dust, wondering what mysteries may lay hidden in the depths of the impenetrable clouds. But there’s no time for that now, this mission is very important and once we get all the data we should head back to Xyth as fast as possible. I promised myself I’d go on a trip with Firewing and visit some nebulae and interesting stars once we're back home. Looking back outside, I slowly saw G634 slide past, nearing the end of our approach, we were on an almost parallel path along the galaxy, dividing my view straight ahead into the near complete blackness of deep space on my right and the overwhelming colorful brightness of countless stars on the left. Forty more days and then we would leave this part of space behind us. Aside from some turbulence while slipping in and out of orbits, the maneuver went without any problems. Moru’s calculations were spot on and as we approached our target, she prepared to ignite the main jet-ion hybrid warpgate engines, which would lift us from the grasp of the galaxy's gravitation and send us on our way to waypoint eleven. “Matrix of propulsion engines on standby. Injectors at full capacity. Final diagnostic shows all systems are ready to go.” Moru continued to check our trajectory, even with all the processor power available, one does not simply calculate a path through a gravity field as complex and ever-changing as only a galaxy has, in real-time, so she had to perform small last-minute changes. A small error at our current velocity could either send us deep into the galaxy or far beyond the location of waypoint eleven, with us having to spend a lot of time to get back on track as a result. “Stabilizers at maximum sensitivity. Main engine cluster ignition in five… four… three… two… one… ignite.” Wave after wave of shocks went through the ship as the massive engines battled against the gravitational pull of G634. Slowly, the stabilizer circuits took over and the turbulence faded away. We were on our way to the next entry into 4D space. “How did it go?” It seemed like a successful maneuver to me, but I wanted to hear Moru’s opinion on it anyway. “Less than 0.00000201 percent deviation. But I can easily adjust our trajectory when needed along the way. We have about 19.17 thousand lightyears to go and our current velocity is 0.387c and rising.” “I take it we have to come to an almost full stop before entering 4D space again?” “Yes, with our current limited knowledge of 4D travel I wouldn’t risk entering at higher speeds than 0.001c. The higher dimensions are very complex and navigational errors could cause us to land millions of lightyears off our course.” One of the more exciting things about space travel were the amazing speeds that could be reached with the proper engine setup. Back in the days when I was part of the ‘Core Special Ops.’ fleet, the ship I piloted, called ‘Firewing’, was one of the fastest available. The first heavy fighter class ship to use pulse-plasma sub-warp engines and we could go as fast as 0.00087c or ‘subwarp 8.7’ which was quite impressive for a small ship. Even the largest warships in the TEC-fleets could only get up to 9.35sw and only after long periods of continuous acceleration. TEC always had the most advanced capital ships, but we in the Core had the best heavy fighters and special ops vessels. Then we met the Tanyu ships and everything we had suddenly felt prehistoric and barbaric compared to the capabilities of the Tanyu capitals. We were lucky to have them on our side during the Coalition war. Later we also got introduced to the Neyon ship class, who even outperformed the Tanyu. And here I am, so many, many years later, exploring the depths of space along side what has to be the most advanced and intelligent, the most complex entity in the entire universe. Neyon’Moru upgraded the engines on Firewing, among other things, so he’s almost five times as fast as he used to be, still, that’s only a fraction of Moru’s maximum speed. Somewhere along one of the last four waypoints I recorded our highest speed thus far : 0.418c. I made some calculations and with our current velocity and over nineteen thousand lightyears to go, of which we would spend over eight thousand accelerating, I expected us to break our previous record. “So if we have to slow down to 0.001c and spend all our time accelerating and then decelerating, I calculated we’ll reach a new record of about 0.473c. Correct?” “From that figure I can see you used the most optimal settings and continuous acceleration. To save some fuel I won’t use the tier three and four sub-thrusters and for safety reasons we should slow down to 0.03sw. So I’m expecting a maximum speed of 0.468c, which is still a record for this mission.” “Just for this mission? So what’s your all-time record, then?” “0.581c, that took about thirty-three thousand lightyears of continuous acceleration, which was a test to see how the latest engine upgrades performed. If we can figure out a way to travel trough the higher dimensions more easily and for longer than just the few moments we're capable of now, high speeds like that won’t really be necessary anymore to travel long distances in reasonable amounts of time.” “Now that you mention higher dimension travel again, how is the research coming along on that matter?” “I’m expecting to have the second set of calculations finished by the time we’re back in Xyth, those numbers combined with the data we’re gathering on this mission should enable us to build a first advanced extra-dimensional engine prototype. If our theories are correct, this engine should allow us slightly more complex maneuvers in 4D space, rather than just entering it at a certain speed and angle and hoping we fall back in 3D space after a short amount of time and preferably close to where we want to be. Despite all our successful dimensional jumps, it’s still dangerous since we’re mostly flying blind when in higher-dimensional space. None of my current sensors can deliver useful data while in 4D. It will take a very specialized ship just to fly safely in, out and through the higher dimensions.” “And that ship probably wont have any means of protection if it runs into any problems while in 4D.” “Exactly, we’re still a long way from being able to explore what lies beyond the borders of our 3D reality.” “And there’s still a lot to be explored within those borders as well, I’m sure. How long till we reach the next waypoint?” “fifty-nine thousand Earth-years.” “More than enough time to tell a story…” |
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