World Beyond Light

World Beyond Light

R. Vincent Riccio

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 — R.Vincent Riccio

Science Fiction Series

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

* * * * * *

Chapter One

The world was a complex, crowded, and bickering environment in 2645. The mid-third millennium brought with it a confusion of events along with a cataclysm of cultural and logistical problems, in addition to scientific and functional ones. Disputes and skirmishes had broken out all over the planet: between nations, between states, between communities. The people of planet Earth had not yet learned to moderate their manufacturing and ecological injuries sufficiently; as a consequence, the world’s land area had shrunk about 10 percent in the last few hundred years due to melting of the polar caps.

With a planet of 12 billion people, open land was at a premium, and overcrowding bred additional problems that governments could not easily resolve. This unfortunate condition was well understood by the various scientific communities, although continually minimized by the political establishment, which, simultaneously and oxymoronically, promised to improve the situation.

Science had given citizens of the super powers longer lives, thanks to extensive DNA research, along with the development and implementation of a variety of modern nutritional and chemical agents. A specific chemical regimen was developed for each person, dependent upon the heritage and individual blood type for the small number of people who could afford it; the rest were bitter and resentful, but simply had to make do. Thus, health conscious people lived to their maximum of about 140 years, while those whose bodies were abused, or were poor and could not afford the expensive life extension programs, made it only to the lower end, at about 80.

Even though modern civilization had moved more than halfway through its third millennium, poorer, overcrowded countries still existed, since governments found that universal prosperity was not an easy thing to effect, regardless of the political style or philosophy employed. With the avaricious in every culture clinging jealously to their wealth, economic change was exceptionally slow. The world governments could not extricate the rich from the affluence which they possessively embraced, even in heavily socialist countries. Thus, there were still many weak and indigent babies born, a good number of whom died quickly of malnutrition and disease, which blunted an even greater population explosion.

The governments of Asiatic countries mandated a single child for a husband and wife by law, and none at all for those who were single, strict contraception methods and laws being vigorously maintained. In countries worse off than that, there were no population control laws at all, causing their citizenry to grow, suffer, and die more rapidly than the richer and more advanced cultures. Hence, the need for improvement; but, poor as they were, such countries were still reticent to listen, having cultural and archaic religious beliefs which still pervaded their myriad communities. At the same time, wealthier countries believed they could no longer afford to contribute to the fostering and growth of the poorer ones, and so they didn’t. This set up an intrinsic dispute and varieties of conflicts between those two polarized entities.

For most of the West, there were rules and proscriptions for birth and population control mandated by the governments, but they were not lawfully enforced; yet everyone understood the necessity for birth control and the many problems that overpopulation brought with it. Therefore, these societies largely adhered to those prudent recommendations, except for a handful of stragglers, who continued to abuse society with their ignorance, indifference, and general stubbornness.

So it came to pass that members of the scientific community, including NASA, saw as inevitable the necessity to expand mankind beyond Earth, to start over, start fresh, bereft of the environmental problems mankind had inflicted upon the third planet since the advent of the industrial age. Finding the proper method to accomplish that was the true problem; many thought it could not be accomplished without a major transformation of the world’s essential civilization. Most people had given up on the concept of being able to implement a solution on Earth.

With that in mind, all telescopes, along with the various satellites and probes sent into space, increased their vigilance, scouring the universe for a possible new habitat, a new potential Earth, with conditions as similar as possible to those of our home planet. None matching the many unique conditions of the only water planet in our Solar System had as yet been found close enough to travel to. There were some promising planets that were located by those combined investigatory mechanisms, but they were far too distant by the current capabilities of Earth space travel; some of the closer ones would need serious terraforming, taking decades to implement if we could ever reach them. Thus, the search went on.

The momentous development of a space craft that could breach the light barrier 20 years earlier was an important achievement, matching the efforts of the astronomical teams. The primary engine for the craft was the MAM Drive, a matter-anti-matter engine that could be used to propel the rocket ship beyond the speed of light, a task previously thought half a millennium ago to be impossible by Einsteinian physics. There were only a handful of physicists who thought that theoretically imposed limit was ridiculous, the conventional wisdom being that Einstein was right; as it turned out, the conventional wisdom was, once again, wrong.

The discovery of dark matter and energy in the universe, along with the incredible estimated size of the universe, which most scientific intelligence said had to expand beyond the speed of light to get where it was today, contributed to that momentous scientific change; it allowed us to understand that a space ship would not be travelling through the nothingness which appeared to exist between stars, galaxies, and planets, but rather through a sea of matter and energy, most of which was not visible to the naked eye or standard telescopy.

A fast rocket ship travelling through space, especially one approaching Light Speed, was therefore more akin to a submarine powering through an ocean than an object moving through a total vacuum. As the space craft approached the speed of light, it passed through an enormous amount of hidden matter and energy, and a great deal of it was available to be accessed by, and rammed into, the MAM Drive engines, since a constant stream of fuel was always present to enable the drive to function at its maximum output.

The matter-anti-matter mechanism had been available for 50 years now, but the thought of designing it as an engine that could power a space ship beyond the speed of light was a recent one, subscribed to by only a handful of physicists, scientists, and aerospace engineers. However, 2 years ago NASA designed a completely automated robotic space craft to make that incredible journey utilizing the matter-anti-matter engine. Onboard computers were able to set the Drive to maintain an eventual acceleration of 15g’s, or 480 feet per second per second - the maximum the newly designed engine could accelerate the craft - until the ship attained and then passed Light Speed. The robotic vessel took 38 days to accomplish that, as it was watched from the ground, and then, once it passed its illusive and heretofore considered impossible mark, it disappeared, no longer able to be tracked, although it was able to send a stream of information backward to the .base for a time, albeit slowly; then, one day, the information simply stopped coming. Whether this was a natural development of extreme plus-Light Speed, or some accidental cataclysm which befell the craft, no one could know.

Theoretically, and according to the new physics, the unmanned ship would continue its plus-light journey indefinitely, ever accelerating toward infinity - or until it hit something. Doing a little theoretical math, physicists gaged that the robot craft would double the speed of light every 38 days; so, in a year it would be doing roughly 10 times Light Speed, or 1,862,820 miles per second, and in a hundred years be travelling 10 times that, or over 18 million miles per second: all of which did bring the expanse of the universe much closer; however, it would still take quite a while to get to the perceivable edge, even at that fantastic rate, 100 times Light Speed (100LS), that being a quarter of a light year per day and 100 light years per year. Thus, at that speed alone, it would take the robot ship a minimum of 700 years to get to the edge of the galaxy, and 140 million years minimum to get to the edge of the perceivable universe; but it certainly did bring it closer. The trouble was, not only was that incredible speed too slow to get anywhere in a sane amount of time, but no human being could take that advanced g-force, even sitting in a comfortable acceleration flight chair.

Having thus accomplished the Einsteinian impossibility and exceeded the Lorentz factors, what remained was to see if a similarly constructed ship with a full human crew could be propelled beyond Light Speed to explore the universe, pioneering the contraction of its vast horizon to within mankind’s reach.

Everyone connected with the project realized it would need to be a special crew, since the likelihood existed that it could very well be a one way trip. Once they were travelling in excess of the speed of light, if it could be done, there would be no tracking the ship, no communications between Earth ground and crew, although the Captain might be able to relay information back for a time. The ship and crew would be completely on their own.

All those factors now well understood, it was acknowledged that true exploration of deep space necessitated a Beyond Light Craft, a BLC. The precise dimensions of the universe were still in question, with many hypotheses as to its overall size, as well as how far away other galaxies actually were; and, of course, that was constantly changing as the cosmos apparently flung away from themselves by a mysterious force no one completely understood. The diameter of the universe was estimated as being some 14 to 20 billion light years across by some, while believing it to be closer to 100 billion light years across by others; then there were still others who believed it to be infinite and we only saw about 14 billion light years of it due to the finite speed of light. The issue had been debated for over half a millennium. It seemed like the only way one could ever truly know was actually to travel there; but, of course, without a craft which travelled beyond Light Speed, any such journey and investigation was functionally impossible.

The fact was that, at the speed of light, it would take a minimum of 14 billion years to get to the edge of the perceptible universe. At a billion times the speed of light, it would still take at least 14 years to get there; and that’s if one could ever go a billion times the speed of light, and if the edge of the universe were only 14 billion light years away! At 100 billion LY distant, it would take 100 years, and at a billion times Light Speed. The numbers were daunting, and whatever their accuracy was, other galaxies were a long way off and would take considerable time to reach, which was a good reason why we hadn’t seen any inter-galactic intelligent life travelling to our shady little planet yet. Even travelling from one end of our Milky Way galaxy to the other was a daunting task, at 100,000 light years across, forgetting travelling to the other galaxies which were virtually infinitely further away.

Scientists knew that there could never be an instantaneous warping into some hyperspace dimension where there was no acceleration or g-force to the craft or its occupants while it was accelerating, at least not in our spacetime. If ever a ship could suddenly warp to Light Speed, in a matter of seconds, it would smash all the occupants and everything else within the craft against the back of it into jelly, assuming the craft itself could survive the transition in one piece. No matter how one got to Light Speed, there would always be the factor of the gravity force generated by the ship’s acceleration; generating considerable momentum, which could not be obliterated; there was no known way to make that simply disappear. However uncomfortable and inconvenient, Newtonian physics still did apply.

Clearly what was necessary to explore the universe was speed: lots of it. But it would take time to get up to speed, and then just as much time, and energy, to slow back down from it. That presented some staggering problems in itself, beyond simply attaining Light Speed.

Looking into space, even the closest galaxies, dwarf galaxies like Canis Major (@ 25,000 LY) or Sagittarius (@ 81,000 LY) were those tens of thousands of years away at the speed of light. And our closest spherical galaxy neighbor, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away: which would take that 2.5 million years to reach at Light Speed. Thus, exploration of these relatively close locations absolutely necessitated a beyond light craft (BLC); otherwise, we had to consider them forever unreachable.

Ignoring travel to another galaxy, simply navigating around within our own galaxy would take eons, 100,000 years to traverse its diameter, at the speed of light, and half that amount (50,000 years) to travel from it’s center to the edge. To visit any of the other possible stars and planets within our own galaxy, a fast craft which was capable of breaching the light barrier was a practical necessity, else mankind was forever doomed to live out his lonely existence on the third planet from the sun in its little out-of-the-way Solar System, located in its out-of-the-way galaxy at the outer reaches of the known universe.

Despite all the mathematical and theoretical physics impossibilities, many of which had within the last few hundred years been surpassed, it was thought that the development of a faster-than-light ship was the first step to being able to actually explore the universe. Perhaps once mankind travelled beyond light, there would be more discoveries, and still faster travel could be developed. Journeys of a million light years, and to our closest neighboring galaxies, still began with a single step, and that first step was for mankind to travel beyond the speed of light. It was akin to developing the steam engine, which happened nearly a millennium before.

What intrepid scientists and engineers had newly discovered was that plus-light travel was not the intrinsic impossibility it was previously thought, applying Einstein’s theories of relativity, but rather it presented severe logistical problems. How do you get an engine to power a ship that fast, which brought into focus the real problem of going to Light Speed: obtaining enough fuel to keep the engine going long enough to propel a ship to that velocity. Under normal power, even using nuclear engines, it would take virtually limitless fuel to accomplish, which made such a voyage impossible since the ship would have to carry its own fuel. The fuel itself would also need to be literally infinitely abundant and therefore at least that part agreed with Einsteinian physics; the more fuel you carried, the more power you needed to accelerate everything, and that increased power would require more fuel, and so on to infinity. That made attaining Light Speed with any standard type of drive mechanism impossible: one point for old Albert. What was necessary was a source of enormous power that took up little or no space, had little or no mass; and was super economical with fuel: that seemed impossible, and point two for Einstein.

The MAM Drive defeated Albert’s hypothesis and solved the problem in that a space craft powered by that engine would literally be swimming in an infinite amount of fuel which it did not have to carry, and it took a relatively small amount of it to obtain enough power for the engines to continue working. It would be like having a fast submarine which had engines that utilized water for fuel and could propel it indefinitely at maximum speed.

That left NASA with the next logical part of its objective: searching for a special team that could meet the rigors of such a mission. They found them and proceeded to plan construction of the BLC powered by the MAM Drive engines, an endeavor that would take 2 years to accomplish.

NASA scientists and engineers knew a human crew could not endure the constant acceleration of 15g’s that the robotic ship could manage, or be crushed by the gravitic force. Certainly a person in good physical shape could endure high g-forces for a matter of minutes, but beyond that, it would be destructive, and he or she would not even be able to move. It was thought that they would have to travel at a more leisurely and tolerable 1g acceleration for an extended period of time; unfortunately, that time amounted to a year and a half before they could reach and exceed Light Speed (LS). Any more constant acceleration than that would be destructive to a living Earth being. Still, the crew would have to use hibernation chambers for most of the trip, to conserve resources, an invention developed nearly 200 years ago in medical science for the treatment and cure of deadly illnesses.

Even knowing the many disparaging facts, the select crew was ready and ambitious to engage the mission. Six people were ultimately designated to make the momentous voyage, three men and three women, all under the age of thirty-five, all single. It was thought, under the circumstances, not knowing where they would wind up or for how long, this was the optimal strategy for a crew. They were a combination of scientists, doctors, engineers, and space flight experts, all highly intelligent, all well educated, and all ready to risk their lives to expand the fields of science and pioneering into the next frontier.

Most recently, the scientists and aerospace engineers put their heads together and discovered more salient information. First, the more MAM Drive (M-D) engines you put on a craft, the faster you could make it accelerate, since whatever additional fuel those engines needed would be in space as it travelled, and the faster it went, the more of that fuel would be accessible.

Second, they discovered that they could get a craft up to 100g’s of constant acceleration using six M-D engines. The model they put together wasn’t terribly aerodynamic, nor did it look slick and pretty with six, large, bumpy, torpedo-shaped engines outrigged around the midsection of the craft; but in space it would work well, since aerodynamics was not a problem there. Neither did taking off or reentry have to be particularly fast. A ship could rise off the planet at a leisurely 2 or 3g’s and then accelerate to greater speeds once in space, where they no longer had to contend with Earth gravity pulling back on the ship. It could also slow down to a reasonable 1 or 2g rate of decent for a gentle landing.

Third, engineers understood the necessity for power within the ship to run the computer, lights, heat, and other devices. Thus, the MAM Drives also generated all the power the ship needed, which was channeled into capacitors, off of which everything would run; this way, the engines could be off for several days and still maintain all interior power. Recharging was just a matter of letting the engines idle for a time.

Lastly, the ship’s computer had to be able to analyze astronomical objects from afar, so that it would know if the ship encountered a suitable planet or sector to explore. Sensor devices were constructed and installed so that data could be fed into the onboard computers for their analysis.

The remaining problem was not a mechanical one, it was a human one: how to get human beings to take a constant speed of more than 1g. Medical experts decided there was no way to do it for extended periods without rather quickly destroying the humans doing it. Therefore, the last thing to be designed and constructed, most recently, was the acceleration-hibernation (A-H) chamber. This was a large spherical capsule into which an astronaut was placed during space acceleration and/or travel, which was filled with a jelly-like fluid, brought down to 30 degrees F, and then slowly rotated within a polycarbonate globe, all of which nullified the harmful effects of the extreme gravitic force of high acceleration. With the A-H chambers securely in place within the ship, astronauts could crawl inside and endure constant acceleration for extended periods of time, while the synthetic atmosphere virtually stopped their aging processes.

The combined engineering for the entire craft was a sophisticated procedure, and took another 3 years to accomplish. But by 2648, the ship was built and made ready for flight. NASA had tried to anticipate every eventuality the ship could encounter and designed a computer that would handle the BLC during acceleration and normal travel. It would have to see anything large that was in the ship’s path and adjust its direction slightly to ensure that it did not collide with the craft.

Smaller asteroids and space debris, things the size of a baseball and less, were more of a problem, since they would only be able to be perceived at the last minute, or even second, at the rate of speed they’d be going, and could easily puncture the craft. The problem was that the sensors sent out signals and received data at the speed of light, which the BLC would be exceeding, therefore anything in the ship’s path would be closer than it looked.

With that in mind, and as a proactive precaution, the nose of the ship had to be constructed of the hardest substance mankind could develop, which turned out to be a compound they called diamond glass. It was a complex polymer of Aluminum, Titanium, Carbon, Manganese, Silicon, and Magnesium, 2 inches thick, which, although weighty, could be driven literally right through the planet without fracturing. Small meteors and asteroids that could not be avoided would explode and self-destruct on the adamantine surface of the ship. As an added measure, powerful lasers were mounted on the front of the BLC to blast apart any small asteroids and micro-meteors that were encountered and which the ship did not have time to navigate around. Obviously, perceiving things as far away as possible was of key importance, and to that end, sensors were created with great sensitivity, and directly hooked up to the fastest computer able to be created.

All this finally designed and constructed, the ship was ready for its crew and initial takeoff. Engineers had designed the ship to maintain a constant acceleration of 100g’s indefinitely, which would enable it to attain Light Speed (LS) in 5.6 days, instead of the year and a half it would take at the slowpoke rate of 1g; during that time the crew would be in the A-H chambers. At that point, the engines could be mostly shut down, since that speed would continue until they decelerated the craft in the opposite direction. Alternatively, continued acceleration beyond the speed of light would mean faster access to the greater universe. Every 5.6 days they would accelerate another multiple of LS; in a month, they would be 5.3 times LS. In a year of acceleration, the ship could be travelling at 65 times LS, some 12 million miles per second; in 10 years, 650 times Light Speed, or 120 million miles per second. The decision had to be made on exactly when to stop accelerating for practical and safety purposes.

If the ship stopped accelerating after 5.6 days, once it had just surpassed LS, then reaching the rim of the Milky Way galaxy would take about 70 thousand years, since that rim was as many light years (LY) away: still too slow. If the ship waited a year, to develop even greater velocity, they would then be travelling at 65 times LS, or 12 million miles per second. That would mean that at that point they’d be travelling 1/6 LY per day, or, roughly every 6 days they would travel a full light year, and attain another multiple of LS.

At 1 year, and travelling at 65LS, engineers realized that every subsequent year the ship and crew continued to accelerate, it would achieve another 65 times LS, while travelling another 33 light years as it accelerated to that increased speed. Therefore, at 2 years, the ship would attain a velocity of 130 times LS. At 10 years, the ship would reach 650 times Light Speed; this meant that after 10 years of 100g acceleration, the ship would be navigating through 650 light years every year after that. The questions became, then, how long did they wish to wait, and how far did they wish to travel.

The ground crew of scientists and engineers took a long look at the speed data, analyzing and debating the positives and negatives of one velocity versus the other, also considering the time it would take to get there. It was thought that for this first mission, using the speed achieved at 1 year would be best, 65LS, understanding that it would take another year to slow the ship down to normal velocities. They also had to consider the crew, who would be in hibernation for a year accelerating up, and then another year decelerating back down to where the ship could land, or at least travel at standard sublight velocities.

The NASA ground crew realized that even at this advanced velocity, 65LS, journeying to the edge of the galaxy would take some 800 years. Even at 100 times that (6500 LS), it would be 8 years before a BLC could reach it; and then it would take another hundred years to slow down from that velocity. They reasoned that their time would best be spent journeying about the close portion of the Milky Way they could reach after 1 year’s acceleration: 65LS. In the year it would take to reach that speed, the BLC would have travelled about 35 light years, and then another 35 on the deceleration. Thus, within that 2 years, the ship and crew could get out to 65-70 light years from Earth, unless they continued to travel a greater distance at their beyond-Light Speed. Still relatively close.

The same NASA crew thought they might design a long range flight for the future that would take 100 years, getting the ship to 6500 times Light Speed (6500LS). Then, with deceleration time, another 100 years, they would be out at approximately 7000 LY distance from Earth: still not that far away relatively speaking, and still about 60 thousand light years distant from the Milky Way’s rim; but they were moving in the right direction. Of course, they could always travel to the edge of the galaxy at that advanced speed in about eleven years, but then it would still take another 100 to slow down. And that was if the ship’s computer didn’t find something interesting on the way, in which case they’d overshoot it before they could slow down, and then need more time to turn around and travel back to it. There were many knotty problems in beyond light exploration.

But, that advanced beyond-light trip was for the future; there was a lot of thinking to be done about it before then. For now, the shorter and slower journey was what was on tap, and so the flight crew prepared for their historic blastoff in several days.

* * * * * * *

Chapter Two

The mission was designated Project Aurora, mankind’s adventure to the stars, beyond the speed of light. The speedy craft that would take the space explorers there was christened Helios-1.

The crew of 6 readied for flight: 3 men, Jason Tonelli, 35, Alec McConnell, 32, Joseph Railsback, 33; and 3 women, Erin Shoenfeld, 31, Gerri Allessian, 32, and Taylor Jarrett, 33.

Jason and Erin were strictly pilots and navigators, expert Astronauts and flight engineers, able to fly just about anything that the Air Force and NASA had that left the ground, and a variety of things that didn’t. Both brown haired, brown eyed, tan skinned Americans, Jason originally from Australia and Erin from Germany, they worked so closely together on this project that they appeared to be more brother and sister than shipmates.

Joseph Railsback was a handsome and rugged dark skinned man and their chief medical officer, while Taylor Jarrett, a fair-skinned, red haired, green eyed young woman, was his backup, having worked both in research and the hospital in addition to her current astronaut duties.

All the engineering and computer duties were shared by Alec McConnell and Gerri Allessian, both engineers in combined fields themselves. Both born in the US, fair-haired, blue-eyed Alec’s family was of English extract, while hazel-eyed, raven-haired Gerri’s was from India and Romania. Both had been in engineering all of their lives, taking relevant science and engineering courses as early as 4th grade. For both crew members, engineering and science in one form or the other was not only their occupation, it was their hobby. They had signed on with NASA several years ago because the agency had need for them, and because of the increased adventure.

The ship was prepared and readied for take off in May, on Sunday morning. The computers fully programmed, the electronics all rechecked, the astronauts completely prepared, the extraordinary beyond light mission was set to be engaged.

Jason Tonelli and Erin Shoenfeld manned the controls as they sat in their comfortable flight chairs, both reading over instrumentation and computer information one more time. The engines were already rumbling quietly beneath them in the large, squat craft.

So, we’re going to be taking off at a constant 1g, is that right, Jayce? Erin asked him.

Essentially. It’s more like 2 g’s at initial blastoff, adding Earth’s gravity to that.

Mm-m. Not much g-force against us. Especially for a blastoff.

Compared to a jet takeoff, no, that’s for sure.

We could take a lot more, at the start.

"No point, ‘Rin. The place that will take all the time is in space, where we’ll be going to 100g’s. If we stayed at 1 g acceleration, it would take us a year and a half to get to Light Speed, and we’d double that every additional year and a half. Way too slow to do any meaningful exploration. Would take us 150 years to