Three Stages to the Stars Part One
The Garden of Offworldly Delights
“Robots can send back all the pretty pictures. And if they really want to experience it firsthand, there’s always virtual reality.”
“I know there’s virtual reality,” conceded Falak, “and I agree that it is advanced enough that the senses are easily fooled by it. However, what about gravity, or more specifically, the lack of? That cannot be simulated.”
“We’re working on that. Falak, the future of entertainment is in inner, not outer space. I’ve looked over your proposals for the space resort. I must say I was impressed, but the price tags, well, astronomical.”
“You’ve got to spend to make, Mr. Lee. Look at these profits. The resort can be built in two years and pay for itself in two more. Don’t forget about the prestige this will bring to our company. There’ll be lots of free publicity. Perhaps even government subsidies.”
“We’ll have the brain jack connection on the market by then. You won’t need to go in space to take a space vacation. Right down to the zero-gravity.”
“The timetable can be pushed up by a year.”
“It won’t matter, Falak. There’s no point in sinking company resources into a dying field. We need to commit our resources to the fast completion of the brain jack connection.”
“There’s no need to hurry. We’re decades ahead of the competition. This is the time to explore new markets, not to throw everything recklessly into one operation.”
“The brain jack is the new market. Silly woman, reality is an obsolete field in the entertainment business. Your space resort can handle only a few hundred people at a time, and is a very limited environment. With the brain jack, we can create entire universes the whole world can enter.” The whole world. Yes, those visionaries of the mid-20th century would have been sorely disappointed had they lived to this day. Human settlement was still earthbound. The entire off-planet population could be counted on one’s fingers and lived six-month shifts in an aging tin can a few hundred miles above the ground. Space, an airless, waterless place, was for robots, not people.
Falak had watched her laboratory’s mission go from exploration to research to manufacturing to military, and finally to its present incarnation, a division of a diversified entertainment corporation, where they operated suborbital thrill rides operated out of the world’s first cosmodrome-turned-theme park. It had been a frustrating career. Wasn’t progress supposed to be forward? It’d been sixty years- sixty years of futility. Miniature rovers and robotic bugs made the first round trip to Mars. Fusion power had finally killed the solar power satellite project, leaving the prototype drifting in space. The great asteroid mines and space factories? They were all fully automated. People had no place in space. Yet she felt she had. She always had this longing for the stars. Many did. Soon, the brain jack was going to make it one of virtual adventures to virtual stars. That was no substitute for the real thing for her, though many said reality was old fashioned, and Falak was indeed old fashioned for her times.
“My fellow adventurers,” she spoke to an assembly of the Space Resort project management team, “the window of opportunity is fast closing.” That was no news- one look at the project team showed a number of old faces many near or past retirement age. Falak herself was more than twenty years past retirement age and was working for a pension salary. “I mean it this time. We are at the event horizon,” she stressed, likening the situation to the point of no return from a black hole’s gravitational pull. “Human spaceflight is going to be gone in a few short years.”
“Falak, you’re not planning to retire, are you?” interrupted a voice from the crowd.
She laughed. It was moments like these that kept spirits up in this business long after the rewards stopped coming. “Retire? Ha! Not if the world ended!” Then the tone of her voice changed to a more serious one. “I’ve been fired. Our department is being closed. Human spaceflight has no place now that the brain jack is on its way to market, they say. It’s always been an elusive dream. A good many years ago, long before I started working, we seemed so close- we went all the way to the moon, and then the next step was just around the corner. Always just around the corner. But now the dream really is dying. I know. I’m disappointed too. No, no, not disappointed, why, I’m enraged that it would come to this!” She paused for a long time. How did it come to this? The conquest of space defeated on the ground. “Farewell, my fellow adventurers…”
* * * * *
The constellations of the night sky beckoned brightly over a clear night sky. “Someday… What do you think, Falak?”
“Well, Thaqib... Someday…” Sixty years ago they’d met, university students studying astronomy, gazing out at the night sky from the roof. Now, sixty years later, on the roof again, and not out there in the sky. “Ah, I remember clearly. We were going to get married and live happily among the stars… Well, the first part’s worked, the second…”
“Patience, my Falak. We’ll make it to the heavens yet.”
“Well yes,” she laughed, “though it’d be nice to get there another way.”
“Perhaps the old stories were right then, maybe people weren’t meant to live among the stars.”
“Don’t you say that, Thaqib! Yes, I know that robots can do the work better, but it’s not about getting the job done. It’s about, the excitement, the adventure!”
“Adventure? Falak, we’re old. We may be young at heart, but our bodies are old. I get exhausted after a day of just walking around. You still seem pretty good, but you’ve got to face the biological facts. Maybe the brain jack won’t be so bad a thing.”
“Not such a bad thing? Call me old fashioned if you must, but I must have the real thing.”
“You and I are getting too old for real adventures. Eventually we’ll barely be able to carry our own weight…”
“That’s it! That’ll be the time!” Falak’s face lit up and she sat up straight.
“Has the full moon gotten to you again?”
“The moon! One sixth of the earth’s gravity! Do you see what I mean? And the air there would be much cleaner than we could possibly hope for on Earth. Or even better, a space station, floating in zero gravity… Stand up, dear Thaqib, we shall soar among the stars just yet!”
“I must say…all these years I would never have dreamed that the settlement of the stars would begin with the old and feeble.”
“Old and feeble on earth. Young and spirited in space. Come now, let’s get going! The countdown clock’s ticking away!”
version 1.2
March 25, 2003
(c) 2003 Alfred Twu
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