Interstellar Space and a New Race
I was part of a crew of a couple of dozen on the maintenance staff of a giant colony transport. We were headed to a far off world that was undergoing terraforming. Our journey was expected to take about 240 years or more. We were provisioned to keep our 120,000 or so sleepers alive for about 500 years, so had some room for error.
The twelve of us were mostly idiot savants, tech talented people who'd been converted into cyborgs. Only about 4 of were of the more fully mentally functioning sort, but psychologically we'd been the only ones who'd passed the battery of tests to determine that we would be able to live the day in and day out exitance for half a millennium or more. The trip was pretty much looking at the blinking lights and then taking care of whatever had caused the sensors to trip. We kept most of the maintenance crew in near sleep, linked into a VR utopia for stimulation, waking them with a slow transfer to meat space when we needed their special skills for maintenance or repair tasks. Many of the kids, as I thought of them, were able to work hundreds of days in a row on routine tasks with little or no supervision. There were a couple of them who's VR environment looked remarkably like their day to day existence.
About 114 years into the trip, two VR lifetimes for most of our charges, we were using a previously thought to be planetless sun to provide some free acceleration onto the final leg of our journey. The 100 ships in the fleet began to coordinate our observations of the system and then fall into line to swing through. We were then contacted by a tight beamed radio communication. I started as a pulse, then four pulses then four pulses, a negative pulse, and four more pulses, then more increasing sizes finally up to 1025, etc. I figured out the pulses were defining a square frame, and we sent back a similar frame 1024 square. Then we received an image. Almost photographic of a pair of wasp like aliens. We sent back a photo of a pair of humans. Over the course of our 7 month swing through their system they stayed in contact with us and even managed to mount an uncrewed mission to get a closer look at our ships and selves.
The twelve of us were mostly idiot savants, tech talented people who'd been converted into cyborgs. Only about 4 of were of the more fully mentally functioning sort, but psychologically we'd been the only ones who'd passed the battery of tests to determine that we would be able to live the day in and day out exitance for half a millennium or more. The trip was pretty much looking at the blinking lights and then taking care of whatever had caused the sensors to trip. We kept most of the maintenance crew in near sleep, linked into a VR utopia for stimulation, waking them with a slow transfer to meat space when we needed their special skills for maintenance or repair tasks. Many of the kids, as I thought of them, were able to work hundreds of days in a row on routine tasks with little or no supervision. There were a couple of them who's VR environment looked remarkably like their day to day existence.
About 114 years into the trip, two VR lifetimes for most of our charges, we were using a previously thought to be planetless sun to provide some free acceleration onto the final leg of our journey. The 100 ships in the fleet began to coordinate our observations of the system and then fall into line to swing through. We were then contacted by a tight beamed radio communication. I started as a pulse, then four pulses then four pulses, a negative pulse, and four more pulses, then more increasing sizes finally up to 1025, etc. I figured out the pulses were defining a square frame, and we sent back a similar frame 1024 square. Then we received an image. Almost photographic of a pair of wasp like aliens. We sent back a photo of a pair of humans. Over the course of our 7 month swing through their system they stayed in contact with us and even managed to mount an uncrewed mission to get a closer look at our ships and selves.
posted by Fermius Firefly | 4:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home