081: ANTARCTICA

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>

“Um,” I say, intelligently, like the seasoned intellectual that I am. “What?”

“Aspen, do you know why the Javelin Program took off in the first place?”

“Of course. With the Kleiner Array, people saw viable exoplanets with a clarity never before seen, and the Exodus Phenomenon – ”

“Like with you, there was an inciting incident. You’re a sociologist who specialises in Neocambrian-era civilisations; I imagine that you know quite a lot about Mars?”

“Sure. For a non-Martian.” I don’t bring it up – I don’t want to brag – but on Earth I’d had a colleague who’d actually gotten clearance to go to Mars for a full three months and brought back all kinds of interesting information about their civilisation. “But the Martians definitely weren’t involved in the Javelin Program.” Things probably would’ve gone smoother if they had been, with their ancestors’ terraforming experience.

“No. They weren’t. But you know their history, right?”

“Sure. During the flooding, while my ancestors were busy trying to create the two Arboreae, the Atlantic Coalition were pooling their resources to have their populations escape rising sea levels by settling in space stations, ultimately turning their eyes to Mars since they’d been denied the moon in the Acresian War Treaty. But then the Korean War broke out, and the rest of the Coalition broke their defense pact and prioritised their terraforming project rather than protecting Korea, so Korea broke ties and revealed that they’d been a lot better at keeping their revolutionary terraforming tech secret than their allies had. Using their own secret tech and tech stolen from their allies, they beat the Coalition to Mars and used the Extraterrestrial Sovereignty Accords to claim the planet as a new nation, then immediately closed borders with the nations that had betrayed their parent nation. Are you saying something like that happened with the Javelin Program? Someone in our coalition tried to steal it by… seeding it with mad scientists? Because that doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, I’m not saying that. Although I am surprised that no one tried it.”

“No one tried it because it doesn’t make any sense. Mars and Korea have strong international relations to this very day – or at least, to the very day that we left Earth. Korea’s the only nation that Mars has open borders with, and their trade, especially in technology developed on Mars in isolation, and kept Korea on the map. It was massively beneficial for them, and not just in saving their population from the flooding. But that doesn’t apply to the Javelin Program. This isn’t solving anyone’s population problems; if that was the issue, they wouldn’t have wasted four thousand chronostasis pods on valuable convicts! And trade with Earth is going to be impossible. Communication with Earth is going to be functionally impossible. There’s no reason for a nation to try to hijack a project like this. Why, are you here to somehow hijack this colony for Tarandra? That’s what the money to the Sands family bought?”

Captain sands laughs quietly. “No. Quite the opposite.”

“You’re here to… stop a hijacking?” That would explain his paranoia, but it still doesn’t make any sense.

“No. I’m here for… look. Have you noticed that the science here is weird?”

“You don’t say.”

“New kinds of synnerve creating a mind interface with a computer. Genetic engineering using some technique out genetic scientist has never seen, that penetrates every cell in the body – something that’s supposed to be impossible. Nothing here is new; this is all technology that takes years, decades to develop, and there’s no way we shouldn’t have heard about it, because it has too many applications in the world we left behind to go unnoticed. Unless it was secret, on purpose, long before the Javelin program started. This was years of very secret work, hurriedly pushed onto the Courageous. And that’s not to mention the edited genes themselves – that immune mechanism? More years of work, totally separate. You can’t just add CRISPR genes to a white blood cell and expect it to be able to engineer other cells. I didn’t understand most of Heli’s explanation, but apparently there’s cellular hardware involved, and it’s a complicated thing to add to a mammalian cell, very complicated. And it’s interfering with something very complex and fundamental; the immune system. So that makes it so much harder to do without killing the patient. Not to mention how easily the telomere thing would kill people if it was even slightly wrong; that there is a whole other branch of research and refinement. The sheer scale of every part of this project – and that’s not even getting into the brain synnerve thing! The doctors have looked at the synnerves from dead patients, and apparently they’re not quite the same as normal synnerves; they’re more sensitive to receiving signals from the brain, and better able to discriminate the signal sources. Almost as good as real nerves. This is just so many projects with so many steps; every one of these should take years of field testing before they’re ready to combine like this. We should know people who have these kinds of synnerves, who have been genetically engineered like this. But we don’t.”

“So it was really, really secret. What are you getting at?”

“What I’m getting at, is that none of this was invented for the Javelin Program. This predates the Program – this predates the invention of Kleiner Array Spectroscopy, by a good long while. It has to.”

“Right, secret government hiding really advanced technology for years, Korea-style. Then they decided to field test it on the Javelin Program for… some reason.”

“I think they decided to test it on the Javelin Program because that was what was available. I think it was initially developed for a longer-term project that had to be scrapped at the very last minute. Aspen, humanity didn’t all just decide to come together and build a bunch of colony ships. Our hand was forced.”

“By what?”

“What else? Market competition. We’re not out here to explore for no reason. We are out here to win a space race.”

I laugh a little in disbelief. “That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody else was building colony ships; people would have noticed. It would’ve been pretty clearly visible, it would’ve cost too much money to hide, it would’ve impeded space traffic. Who were we even competing against? Mars?”

“Antarctica.”

“Antarctica.”

“Yes.”

“Antarctica doesn’t have a space program.”

“I know.”

“Antarctica’s a tiny icy rock with a small population that mostly lives underwater and is, I cannot emphasise this enough, in literally the worst location in the world for launching rockets. Because of how the planet’s rotation works. Which is why they don’t have a space program.”

“I know. But they do have some exceptional genetic engineers. They’re not as lauded for it as your nation, of course, but that is because the Arboreans work with the goal of altering their environment, which isn’t particularly compatible with secret technology. And yet, the Antarcticans throw out something completely unexpected every few years, not scaffolded on what anyone else is doing, some new physical theory or propulsion system design or, yes, genetic breakthrough. Nothing close to the scale of what’s been done to those colonists, but still. Did you know that Cyndyr Kleiner was from Antarctica?”

“The inventor of the Kleiner Array? But… Antarcticans don’t have last names.”

“Nor do you, Aspen ‘Greaves’. Nor does Tinera Li Null or Sunset of Sirius. But we all make do in an international environment. I’m sure many people assumed that a technology being unveiled in Germany by a team with last names like ‘Kleiner’ was probably German in origin, but no. And this was about the time that the Tarandran corporate spies in Antarctica put together that the secret project they’d been tracking for awhile was a deep space colonisation project.” Sands shrugs. “At least, I think it was. They didn’t exactly explain their investigation process when they showed up at my door and asked me to apply for the Javelin Program.”

“People would have noticed if Antarctica started building colony ships. They would’ve been, you know, visible. Up in space.”

“Yes, the Javelin Program got off the ground before they could get that far. Whatever they were planning with their fancy engineering and secret technologies was time consuming, and gathering most of the world governments together to send humanity out into the stars using technology that we already have meant far more resources, far more manpower, a far faster project pipeline. Apparently, Antarctica had found some way to profit as a nation by colonising distant planets and planned to become a world power in – ”

“That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care if they found some kind of magic space dust on Hylara that grants them eternal life and knowledge and lets them rule the world, the timeframes just don’t make it viable. This isn’t Mars.”

“I know. They were a little light on the details when explaining this to me.”

“Light on the details? The details don’t work!”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that. Nevertheless, this is what I was told. If the Javelin Program could settle these planets as independent colonies before the Antarcticans could get there, then under the Extraterrestrial Sovereignty Accords, Antarctica can’t do anything. It really came down to launching first, and we were ready to launch before the Antarcticans even started putting ships together. I was enlisted because the powers that be were worried that Antarcticans might sabotage the terraforming and settling process. I was offered money and a pod for my husband, which is a pretty big concession, so this is something they took pretty seriously.”

“It couldn’t have been just you, though. Were others put on this ship for the same reason?”

“I have to assume so. I wasn’t told.”

“Right. But you have to realise that his doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m well aware. It hasn’t escaped my notice that I was probably lied to.”

“But you got on anyway.”

“Of course! I wanted to be part of the great expansion of the human race. They guaranteed me a spot and offered ridiculous amounts of money besides, and I was able to wrangle a spot for my husband. I wasn’t going to turn it down. I figured that they must have gotten their information wrong, or they were lying about the origin of the threat for security reasons, or something. And they probably were. But then all of this advanced secret science and conspiracies among the first two crews showed up…”

“And you had to be prepared for every possibility,” I finish.

“Exactly.”

“Okay. So this mad science may or may not be connected to a bunch of long-dead Antarcticans and may or may not be connected to a pointless secret space race, or something else that they made up a pointless secret space race to cover up for when explaining it to you. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing, I suppose. It’s like what you said earlier… all of this digging up mysteries is very interesting, but it doesn’t actually help us do anything but sow unnecessary chaos and unease. And like I said earlier… it’s all pretty irrelevant at this stage. We’re far beyond the reach of Earth now, and after analysing Captain Kinoshita’s notes again I’ve reached the conclusion that whatever else her team were doing, they clearly did want this ship to reach Hylara. Even if this ship has been secretly hijacked by Antarctica for some indecipherable political game… does it matter? We can settle Hylara under an independent flag, or under the Antarctican flag, or stars, under the Texan flag based on the settler population ratio, and it doesn’t make one scrap of difference from our end. So I’m going to make an executive decision and put myself under captain’s orders to focus on matters actually relevant for our future.”

I give him a little salute. “Glad to have you with us, captain.”

Then we both start giggling. For a really long time. I’m giggling too hard to hear the nearby airlock open.

“Um,” Adin says.

We look up to see Adin and Denish staring at us. We immediately sit up straight. Adin’s holding his favourite vegetable knife, shiny and well-maintained, in one hand, and a huge watermelon from one of our greenhouse rings in the other. Denish has a basket of other random fruits. (No citrus, obviously.)

“We were going to lay out a fruit salad for everyone’s lunch,” Adin explains. “But we can come back, if…?”

“No, I think we’re done here,” Captain Sands says. He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Good talk, Dr Greaves.” He stands up and marches away.

Denish raises an eyebrow at me with a little conspiratorial grin. “Are you two..?” he holds up two entwined fingers. “Congratulations, Aspen! He is very pretty man.”

“Kind of a dick, though,” Adin notes.

“He’s happily married,” I tell them, and walk off, leaving them to figure out how that works when you’re in the Javelin Program.

Never a quiet moment on this rootrotting mess of a spaceship.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>