Saving proxima, p.9
Saving Proxima, page 9
Rain, without thinking, gave her a thumbs-up.
Julia then continued her presentation by pulling up charts showing the details behind each phase of the proposed plan.
The questions, debate, fear mongering, and political grandstanding began.
* * *
It was 4:30 and the UN was scheduled to end debate and adjourn for the day at 5:00, none too soon for Rain and the rest of the first contact team. They were exhausted, and they weren’t even the one who had been at the podium for most of the day. Poor Julia must be close to passing out, Rain thought. Though she doesn’t look it. Her AI signaled her that she was getting an urgent message.
She pulled out her datapad and saw that the message was from Enrico Vulpetti: WE NEED TO TALK. 7:00 DINNER AT SARDI’S?
She knew what he wanted to talk about. He’d likely been watching the televised UN debate and heard about the committee’s proposal to send a ship to Proxima Centauri b. And he had approached her about half a year ago with his own proposal for such a starship. Rain was surprised that he would contact her, given that she was extremely vocal in her opposition to such a ship at the time and was the main reason his proposal never made it to the UN for consideration. Things had changed dramatically since then. Her opinion had changed.
She replied, SEE YOU THEN.
After the UN adjourned, Julia was swamped by the media and didn’t get out of council chambers until after 6:00. Rain congratulated her on the presentation and told her, briefly, about her dinner meeting with the aerospace physicist from Georgia Tech.
“Find out what you can, but don’t make any formal or informal commitments. We’re at a critical juncture in the debate and we can’t afford any appearance of favoritism toward any one group until the world is committed to our plan,” Julia admonished Rain in their brief moment together.
“Don’t worry. I voted against his idea the first time, remember?” Rain said with a smile.
“I remember,” Julia replied, adding, “Be sure to message me afterward to let me know how it goes.”
Rain nodded in affirmation and hurried out the door to catch an autocab to the restaurant. She didn’t want to be late. And, of course, it was raining.
Sardi’s was a New York landmark. Located in the Theater District, the restaurant was built in 1927 and became the place to eat for visiting celebrities. The walls were lined with caricatures of over a thousand celebrities who had eaten a meal there in its one-hundred-sixty-year history. Rain had heard of it, but never eaten there. As she exited the autocab, she saw Enrico standing at the door, looking her way. He still was as handsome as ever. Rain quickly squashed those thoughts to the back of her mind.
“Hello, Dr. Gilster. I’m glad you were able to join me tonight,” he said as he opened the restaurant’s door for her.
“I appreciate the invitation. Your message caught me by surprise, though it shouldn’t have, given our last conversation together,” Rain said. “You know there was nothing personal in my decision?”
“Personal? Oh that? Never crossed my mind.” He dismissed her halfhearted apology.
“Great, then. Good to see you,” Rain said guardedly.
“I watched your colleague’s most impressive presentation today and I must say I am the one who should be surprised.” He smiled a very bright and toothy smile at her. “Surprised at your turnaround on the issue of sending a starship to Proxima Centauri. But let’s not discuss this here in the doorway. We should get our table and at least have an appetizer and glass of wine before we talk business.”
“Of course,” Rain replied. She immediately realized Vulpetti was on a charm offensive. He was as well groomed and appropriately attired as the last time she saw him and was using his contagious smile to disarm her. And, of course, the “no business talk until after we have a drink” was as smooth and polished as they come. She thought that she would need to be on her guard because, well, damn, it was working.
As she expected, the salmon appetizer tasted as good as the menu described it and the wine was perfect. After placing their dinner order, Vulpetti shifted back into “business mode.”
“Dr. Gilster, the reason I’ve asked you here tonight is to make you aware of the progress we’ve made on our starship,” he said.
“You’ve begun building it?” she asked, with more than a hint of surprise in her voice.
“The design is complete; we’ve begun buying the components and lining up the rocket launches that will be required to put it all into space for final assembly. If we remain on schedule, the first component launch will be in just over two years.”
“When we last spoke, I thought you were just talking about something that could be done. I had no idea you were already building it. Who’s paying for it? I haven’t seen anything in the media about it,” she said.
“I can’t divulge the names of our sponsors, but there is big money behind the project and it is moving forward. We have every intention of going to Proxima Centauri b whether the UN approves such a mission or not. We would rather go with their blessing and support if we can. My investors have a lot of money, but perhaps not enough to make the ship as much as it could be. And, quite frankly, this whole Proximan fertility crisis has changed everything. We want to help. We’ve got a head start on the starship and we can take the medical supplies we heard about in the briefing today—if we start planning to do so now. The design is mostly complete, but at this stage we can modify it to accommodate the specific equipment you need for the medical mission fairly easily. A year from now, it will be impossible.”
“How many people can you take?” she asked.
“Twenty-five. The accommodations won’t be luxurious, but they will be comfortable enough. Each member of the crew will have about as much room as you get on a luxury cruise liner,” he said.
“For twenty years,” she said, remembering the trip time he quoted in their previous conversation. “That’s a hell of a long time to be cooped up in a stateroom, no matter how luxurious it is.”
“Well, the good news is that we think we can get the trip time down to ten years, like your spokesperson said today, instead of the original twenty. And there will be an option for sleeping part of the way. It isn’t the cryogenic sleep you see in the VRs, but more of an induced coma. While the person is asleep, their muscles are electrically stimulated to keep them healthy, their bodies are fed, and wastes disposed of. They will still age, they just won’t have to endure the full ten years in deep space. Crew members can choose to sleep all, part, or none of the time during the trip and they can change their minds at any time. And, of course, due to special relativity the trip will seem slightly shorter than ten years to the crew onboard.” Enrico paused for effect and drank the remaining wine from his glass.
“This whole story is, well, difficult to believe,” Rain said.
“Oh, what we are building is very real and we will be more than happy to provide the details and offer a tour of our facilities if the UN is interested in working with us to make the trip happen.”
“May I ask where you are building the ship?” Rain asked.
“The components are being assembled in the United Arab Emirates, but it will be integrated in lunar orbit,” Enrico said.
“The UAE has a history of thumbing its nose at the UN. Will you launch from there too?” Rain asked.
“Most likely. The commercial rocket companies are all international these days and the one we’re working with has a sea launch platform that they can tow just about anywhere in the world,” he said.
“And you want me to be your advocate,” Rain said.
“Absolutely.”
“Despite me shooting you down the first time,” she said.
“You did what you had to do, based on the information you had available. But circumstances have changed. These people are dying unless we get there and help them. Your concerns about biological contamination aren’t unfounded and we are trying our best to mitigate the risk as much as possible in our starship design and in our crew selection. Again, we can provide the details if there is interest. But we need to know soon.” Enrico looked at her expectantly, turning on all the charm he could muster—which was considerable.
“Shall we have dessert?” he asked nonchalantly, flashing his smile once again.
“Absolutely. I’ll take the crème brûlée and a glass of sherry,” Rain said.
“Does that mean we have a deal?” asked Enrico.
“It means we’re having dessert. But I’ll take your offer back to the committee. Tell your team that they’d better be real and have something to show us or a whole lot of important people, very important people, will be extremely unhappy that their time was wasted.”
CHAPTER 9
August 27, 2087
Rain’s AI received the meeting request from Julia Coetzee while she was sleeping, noted its source and urgency, and adjusted Rain’s calendar for the day to accommodate it. In the process, two other meetings were rescheduled for the following week and one was canceled outright. The AI also decided to awaken Rain half an hour early so that she would have ample time for her morning routine, which now always included a brief conversation with her mother.
Rain noted the changes to her schedule as she was preparing her breakfast oatmeal and wondered what the reason Julia might have for calling an emergency, her term, meeting of the First Contact Committee. She would find out soon enough.
Because it was a beastly hot summer day in Atlanta, very typical for this time of year, she decided to participate in the meeting from her home office and not venture to the university. Those online who had visited her home would immediately recognize the backdrop—a room filled with bookcases and stacked with old-fashioned books, paper books, some dating back to the late 1800s. Rain read all of her professional journals electronically, but she preferred the feel of a book when it came to fiction or historical texts. There was something about reading history on paper that made it more real for her.
The meeting began promptly at the appointed time with all but two committee members present. One was unable to be reached, which was quite unusual in this day of everything being network connected, unless one didn’t want to be reached. The other was ill and his AI declined the meeting invitation. Julia wasted no time getting to the point.
“Late yesterday, we received a new message from Proxima Centauri b. This one appears to have come from a different group from the one that sent the first message. They made that very clear in their opening. In fact, the message has the look and feel of a less-well-funded minority or dissident group sending a message in secret. It was brief and to the point. Before I begin, please keep in mind that Earth’s message to Proxima, in which we disclosed our belief that they have a fertility problem, was only sent a little more than two months ago and our first installment of the Biology 101 tutorial was only sent earlier this month.
“Based on this new message from Proxima Centauri, we believe our assessment of their problem is, unfortunately, correct. There is a fertility problem on Proxima and it has reached a crisis stage. They first noticed the decline in female births about a hundred Earth years ago. At first, the decline was small and mostly anecdotal. Based on their level of technological development, I would guess that they were in the latter part of their version of the industrial revolution and record keeping was basically ad hoc, with an occasional census of some kind or another thrown in. The salient point is that it began then and grew gradually worse.
“According to the sender of the message, who we are now calling ‘Dissenter,’ the problem grew worse with time until about twenty-five Earth years ago. Since that time, there have been fewer than one hundred thousand females born each year. Far too few to sustain the human population.
“Dissenter went on to tell us that their scientists have been unable to come up with an explanation or even a hint of how to fix the problem. The Proximan government is trying to keep the civilization and the economy working, but it is failing. Families consisting of multiple men per woman are now common. Female kidnappings and rape are at crisis levels, and much of the younger generation appears to be dropping out of the society. They are hopeless and believe there is no reason to plan for a future. Overall, Dissenter paints a very bleak picture of the place. They are experiencing general economic and societal collapse.
“Dissenter sent an extensive demographic database, which is not much more than our census records, and page after page of notes related to the fertility problem from their doctors and other medical personnel. It was an overt plea for help.”
“Do we have any idea of who this Dissenter is?” asked Hiro Tanaka, one of the “policy” members of the team.
“Yes. From what we can tell, he is a government official who had access to our interstellar message exchanges and the connections necessary to get his message transmitted. The message repeated only sixteen times before it stopped. We can only surmise that someone noticed the apparently unauthorized transmission and terminated it.”
“This means that we are doing the right things to help them,” said Mina Lappas, one of the doctors added to the team after the fertility crisis was discovered and the UN intervention plan approved. Rain liked Mina. They had a lot in common and met regularly in person due to Mina being on assignment at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“I would say so, yes,” replied Julia.
“I hate to say it, but it sounds like we are already too late,” said the group’s only political scientist, Wilhelm Duesenberg. Duesenberg was normally quiet during the committee meetings, which Rain found to be curious. Most political scientists she knew were not exactly the shy and quiet types. Duesenberg normally broke that mold.
“Explain,” said Julia.
“Well, they are now at least twenty-five to thirty years into full-blown demographic crisis, which I would prefer we call it. It isn’t a ‘fertility crisis’ at all. Demographics are destiny and their destiny is bleak, as you said. And they know it. Let’s say we are wildly successful in our medical tutorial and they quickly understand the information we broadcast. How are they going to do anything with it? Do they have the manufacturing base to build the laboratory equipment, tools, and tests necessary to isolate the cause and determine how to mitigate it? Did we also send the electronics and computer science tutorial to allow them to build the computers they will need to make sense of the data? The success of the Human Genome Project was as much about computing power as it was biology. Do they have the virology labs they may need to insert a fix into developing embryos if, in fact, the ‘cure’ can be implemented that way? What if the cause is a virus? Or environmental, as we discussed previously? Will they have the tools and the time to use the knowledge we sent in the proper correlation studies? Time is their enemy and they won’t even receive the first of our biology tutorials for another four years!”
“And if the female birth rate has dropped even lower, then the biology tutorial will be too little, too late. We need to get a fully staffed, fully functional biolab there as soon as possible,” said Rain, her heart breaking as she spoke the words. She feared that it, too, would arrive too late to be of any help at all.
“Rain, the UN did approve the starship relief mission—largely because of you,” Julia reminded her and everyone on the team.
“Yes, they did. Let’s consider Wilhelm’s pessimistic assessment and assume that the ship launches slightly ahead of schedule in two years. It will take a decade to get there. How many women of child-bearing age will there be? Thousands? Hundreds?” Rain asked.
“We don’t have any way of knowing.”
“With society collapsing and what few women there are being threatened with kidnapping, how many will be healthy and accessible when the ship arrives in twelve years? And arrival is when the work really begins. It may take years to isolate the cause before the team can attempt to do anything to correct the problem,” Rain said.
“Don’t forget the contamination risk. As Rain mentioned in one of our previous meetings, and as we’ve talked about several times, there’s a good chance we might contaminate them with some virus that would prove deadly to the local population and vice versa. If we go there and inadvertently kill off the natives or they our team, then the whole thing also fails. Remember, this is the sort of stuff I worry about in my normal day-to-day job at the CDC. And there’s one more thing,” said Mina.
“What’s that?” asked Julia.
“The people we send on the starship. They know that we probably can’t let them ever come home, right?”
“Because of the viral contagion risk? It’s been discussed, but their possible return has always been in the ‘we’ll isolate you when you come home to prevent contamination’ category, not the ‘you can’t come home’ bucket,” said Julia.
“Well, you need to move it firmly into the latter. If there is even the slightest chance this demographic crisis is contagious, we cannot take the risk. Even if an isolation period sufficient to rule out any traditional bacterial or viral infection is implemented, it may not be enough. The risk is too great.”
“Thankfully, I’m not on that committee,” said Julia with a sigh.
CHAPTER 10
July 5, 2089
The hardware didn’t look like it was assembled and ready for a full-power test. Sure, the connections were made, and no wires or optical fiber cables were obviously loose or disconnected. None of the wires or cables were too long—each was exactly the correct length to connect the various parts of the test cell and they were aligned exactly as the final released drawings said they should be. The pristine, shiny housings containing the extremely sensitive electronic equipment looked like they were pictured in the online catalogs from which many of them had been ordered and the gentle hum of the power supplies waiting to be switched into the system sounded exactly like new power supplies should—they hummed. But Senior Test Engineer Roy Burbank knew that something was wrong. The whole test setup didn’t look right, feel right, but he couldn’t put his finger on what wasn’t as it should be. And that bothered him.
