Genesis III Hummed Through Space

I completed my rounds. First, I pulled the panel off the life support grid. But it wasn’t enough just to know all the toggles were lit up green. I closed the panel and walked down the corridor to actually see what was going on at AQuality Deck, and slid open the warehouse doors. The CO₂ converters, the size of a landing field on the moon, with enough space for six ventilating craft from the X23.5 generation, were pushing air.

Next were the food generation fields on the solarium decks. The rows of corn stretched under the white grow lights. Two acres, they’d told me, but it had to be much larger. I broke off an ear of corn, pulled back the husk, and leaned in to smell its milky moisture. The kernels burst in my mouth. Sweet, but not yet ready.

Later, I lay in the commander’s cabin reading an Andy Weir book. While turning pages the ship hummed through space. It occurred to me, not for the first time, should I die of old age, my body no more than a hollowed corpse, the ship would simply move on without me, perfectly indifferent.

I had avoided thinking about deck C43 twelve floors below, the 847 names on the crew manifest, and what their capsule indicators had long been reading. But you never know, and now the elevator opened and at the end of the hall there was a door with ENTRY C43 inscribed on the frame. I swung it open and it closed behind me with an echoed clank. In the musty aired chamber the bodies lined up one after the other in their sleep capsules all the way to the far bulkhead. But they weren’t sleeping and I didn’t look more than once into what were now caskets. Pods of silence sprung in the air like dead bubbles. Within those bubbles, the silence broke cold. I could hear whispers.

I stumbled back to the elevator and hit the bridge button and smashed my thumb on ‘Close Door.’ “Close, dammit,” I said out loud. The whispers were not whispers anymore. They were louder. Finally, the doors whisked shut and I rode up twelve floors. Later, I had one overriding thought. C43 is a place you no longer need to go.

Or think about, I said to myself, as a I lay back on the commander’s sheets.

But this wasn’t a crisis, I told myself. You have food, water, shelter—to last forever. And then I remembered my professor telling me, ‘Never believe your own bullshit’. If my professor were here from NASA he would put his arm around me, shake his white eyebrows, and tell me to ‘work the problem’. But I was no scientist, just a chief medical officer (with no one to treat).

After setting down the book on the night table, I tried to sleep. Later I got up and stood in the observation deck and pressed my forehead against the clear hull and let my breath fog against it, the cold coming through in a wave down my chest. A copper and blue emission nebula with no name in any language on Earth hung fixed like a conch shell whorl. Everything’s color. After walking away from the viewer, I downed a shot of brandy on the bridge and put my hand on the comms desk. I laid it there against the rough edge of the speaker grids and found myself counting them with my fingertips. I held my hand there a long time.

I needed to go to work.

There were planets in the catalog running to forty thousand entries, revolving around forty thousand points of light. I worked through them one by one to find candidates of planets to land on, little blips with crosshairs hovering on a spot in space. One-hundred light years away, two-hundred, two billion. I would bend over the screen and see the images as they arrived at light speed from so far away. Most planets were dead, no life of any kind, wastelands of hard browns. Oxygen levels were usually low or non-existent and carbon was missing altogether.

To my surprise, after a few weeks I found one. The planet scanned with a perfect atmosphere, obvious signs of artificial nighttime light, cities with high-rises, and networks of roads spun like spider webs. And the best thing, it was only 200 light years away.

I set a course, remembering our ship had on occasion traveled more than 200 light years, and in a lot less time.

“COMPUTER, how long will it take me to get to Hope I?” I had decided to call the planet, Hope I.

“I have run diagnostics on travel time, Chief Medical Officer. You can get to Hope I in 5.28 months.

Wait, COMPUTER. Please don’t call me Chief Medical Officer. Call me Isaac. There’s only me.

“Acknowledged.”

“Are you sure?.”

“Here is the formula, Isaac.”

The formula in a holograph image.

γ = 1/√(1−0.999²) ≈ 22.4, so ship time ≈ 200/22.4 years ≈ .44 years (5.28 months)

“COMPUTER, how can I get to Hope I in 5.28 months when it is 200 light years away and I can only go light speed, which I can’t by the way. But if I could, doesn’t 200 light years divided by one year at the speed of light, mean 200 years?”

“Time compression, Isaac.”

“So you’re telling me Hope I will age 200 years from when I plot a course, but I can get there in 5.28 months in my time?”

“Confirmed.”

“The planet will be 200 years older?”

“Sorry, Isaac. You are only half correct. You haven’t factored in images of the planet you are seeing now are already 200 years older. When you arrive, Hope I’s NOW will be 400 years in the future than what you are seeing today.”

“Restate like you’re explaining this to a seven-year-old.”

“It will take 5.28 months, your time, to get there because of time compression. Hope I’s NOW is already 200 years ahead of what you are seeing, plus the planet will move forward in time 200 years in the time it takes you to get there, therefore 400 years.”

With the compass change, Genesis III banked over in space and the bulkheads shuddered and groaned like a lumbering ocean liner striking for a new port of call. Later, I pressed my hands against the clear hull, like glossed glass, on the observation deck and stared at the pin prick of light which was Hope I’s sun. I toasted the planet I knew was there with Courvoisier from the bar, relishing the drink, letting the bitter sweet liquor lay on my tongue before swallowing.

5.28 months. For the first time, I could sleep at night. Still, five months was a long time.

The auto vacuum buzzed by, the size of a small recreation deck disk, constantly cleaning the titanium deck. I had an idea.

“What are you doing, Isaac?”

“I’m converting the auto vacuum, COMPUTER. I’m softening it up, giving it eyes, letting it walk on four legs.”

In a few hours I had it. The auto vacuum had eyes with attached tennis balls. The feet I softened with socks, the whole thing held together with duct tape. It no longer vacuumed but padded the floor.

I named the auto vacuum, Rex. I’d always loved that name for a dog. But it was missing something.

“COMPUTER, can you program the vacuum to bark like a dog through the PA system?”

Almost immediately, working with COMPUTER, the vacuum barked, but admittedly the static overlay wasn’t exactly right. More of a cloud bark or an echo.

“Would you like me to add whimpering”

“Sure.”

It was like Rex took a life of his own. In the Commander’s berth I called him. “Rex, jump!” and the machine (it was still a machine; I knew it was still a machine; I am a medical officer, not a child, and I knew perfectly well what it was) jumped on the Commander’s berth and snuggled against my leg. I suspected COMPUTER was behind some of the features, not just the snuggling but the begging for scraps.

“Good morning, Isaac. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”

“Great.” I rubbed the top of Rex where he lay next to me in bed. I had added towels to stroke him and give him a softer feel. Rex whimpered. “What news, COMPUTER?”

“We are eighty years into our course to Hope I.”

“I know this, COMPUTER.”

“You’ve traveled six weeks?”

“Ditto.”

“Less than four months to go.”

“And this is why you woke me up?”

“I’ve been thinking about your problem to go faster. I’ve looked at the Bussard ramjet to scoop interstellar hydrogen as fuel. Won’t work. Too much drag. There is an Alcubierre warp drive in warehouse storage on E Deck, but this won’t work either. With the Alcubierre drive, space moves and you stay in place, so there would be no time compression.”

“We worked through this. If you remember, I wanted to use antimatter annihilation and to convert the laser sail for extra speed and then you told me we were only 5.28 months away.”

“My calculations show we can arrive in 720 years to a planet one-million light years away using the Antimatter Annihilation Drive. You’ll need to engineer the sail adjustments on the outer shell. It will be dangerous, Isaac. I calculate a 12.2% chance of survival.”

Rex barked. “Down boy,” I said. “So what? Again, we’re only months away from Hope I. Right?”

“Yes, but there’s another issue you should be aware of.”

“Which is?”

“Hope I spectrum readings indicate unsurvivable radioactivity. Visuals are now showing no organic lifeforms.

I confirmed this from the observation deck. The planet was a swirl of yellow-grey weather patterns. What was once a blue (not quite an Earth blue, more greenish) was now a wasteland. Nearly 200 light years away the event occurred. Nearly 200 years in history. I’d been looking at a dead past and hoping for 400 years into the future, only months away.

Rex lay at my feet and whimpered. “Don’t worry,” I said, and rubbed his cloth head. He placed his vacuum extension on my foot. “Looks like it’s just you and me buddy.”

Months went by and Rex and I set a routine. Tennis on the recreation deck with Rex chasing balls, then lunch, then back to work. One day I erased all of the math on the white board, all of the hurdles: energy requirement, dust impacts, radiation. All a waste of time.

Finally, I found a tiny planet tucked in a little corner hiding beyond the Orion Sector, but it wasn’t 200 light years away. It wasn’t less than 200 light years away either. It was 200,000 light years away. I called it Way Too Far II.

I reached down and pulled Rex’s sock ears with both of my hands and put my face against his wash cloth snout. Like any companion dog he looked back with unconditional love, his eyes (yes, tennis balls) melted my heart. “Don’t ever leave me, buddy. Where you go, I go.”

“With proper maintenance your Rex can live far beyond any organic creature.”

“Good to know, COMPUTER.” I laughed to myself, turned on the whiteboard, put the empty years ahead aside, and started over.

A month later, I woke up and checked the clock. “Twelve hours,” I mumbled. My eyes were fused shut and I grabbed a pillow tight around my head, but I heard barking. I found Rex in engineering, howling at a sparkling orange hologram.

“It’s ok, Rex, settle down,” I said. He was running in circles in front of the array. A sock had fallen off and one paw click clicked on the deck like he was growing nails.

In front of me hanging in mid-air was this message in three dimensions. It was like a ghost had inscribed it, but it wasn’t a ghost. For three months I’d been working formulas, too exhausted to think, too exhausted to stay awake to know the combination of the sail array and the gravity generator might work.

The array hung this formula in mid-air.

Yes — mathematically, in special relativity, the calculation is essentially correct.

A trip that takes 200,000 years in the galaxy's rest frame takes 1 day, 0 hours, 59 minutes, and 23 seconds of time aboard the escape pod.

THE MATH IS CORRECT.

Now I was running in circles and Rex was chasing me as he barked. I was the one howling.

I had to launch the escape pod from the hanger bay, but first I had to refit the sail. This meant suiting up and getting to the components on the starboard beam of the exterior hull. The airlock expelled me with a whooshing sound and then there was only the suit and my own breathing. Genesis III turned slowly above me, or below me, direction having stopped meaning anything. I looked down at the coupling to the reflective sail, or thought I did, but the carabiner in my gloved hand had no cable strung through. I kicked hard toward the weightless tether hanging there a few feet away in space, spiked my heart like bleeding, but what was there to kick into?

A calm settled over me. Not many men get to die surrounded by a boundless galaxy spread out in every direction. It’s funny, when I grew up the stars looked like bright dots on a flat dome. Not for me. Not here. The universe was three dimensional and I wasn’t looking at stars. I was IN the stars.

I looked back to Genesis III with a dull pain. It hung there in space with the gravity rotation wheel still turning. I imagined COMPUTER and Rex spending thousands of years streaking through space without me. I reached out my hand, maybe they’d see.

A spark reflected off the hanger bay. Something was moving along the hull toward me and I understood before I could see clearly what it was. Rex held a tether line in what I had decided were his teeth A dust cloud blew behind him. My god, boy, you’ve reversed the vacuum motor to give you a propulsion using your sock feet. And now you’re peddling away. “Come on, Rex! Come to me, boy”. Once Rex was in my arms, I reclipped the carabiner.

Without the weight of Genesis III, the escape pod blasted ahead like a rocket meteor on Forsythe 5. The white sail unfurled and spread a mile or more, enough power to suck energy for a juggernaut, instead of a one man escape pod. Soon, stars were flashing by, but it still wasn’t fast enough. I needed a hair under light speed and flipped the safety cover on the gravity generator field. This could mean speed, real speed, light speed. Or, the other result: I would be instantly flattened from G forces. What the hell, I put Rex in my lap and hugged him with my left arm and flipped the knob with my right hand on the gravity generator.

It was like shooting down a blue tunnel, the walls blurring and liquid, and at the place where the tunnel converged, it came over the horizon of the escape pod’s viewport. I watched it grow from a point of light to a disk to something with weather systems moving across it, slow and purposeful, the way weather moves when it has all the time in the world, blue and white and unmistakable.