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    Kuiper Station: From The Earth Series, #9
    Kuiper Station: From The Earth Series, #9
    Kuiper Station: From The Earth Series, #9
    Ebook80 pages55 minutes

    Kuiper Station: From The Earth Series, #9

    By D.W. Patterson

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    About this ebook

    Kuiper Station: A Novella

     

    What appeared to be a simple but ambitious goal of establishing a new colony in the Kuiper Belt, a colony to service mining activities there, was more than it seemed.

     

    One side, led by the Solar Federation and the Jackson family, was determined to break humanity out of its almost century long stagnation and push it to embrace the stars.

     

    The other side, led by the Terran Federation, was determined to block such expansion and maintain its power.

     

    It would be close but the stars were calling.

     

    Kuiper Station is a novella set in the future (2230s) and is the ninth story in the From The Earth Series which is set in the much larger Future Chron Universe.

     

    The Future Chron Universe consists of 33 volumes including 9 novels, 1 short novel, 15 novellas, and 8 short stories.

     

    Hard Science Fiction – Old School.

    Human-Generated-Content.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD.W. Patterson
    Release dateMay 16, 2023
    ISBN9781386642091
    Kuiper Station: From The Earth Series, #9

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      Book preview

      Kuiper Station - D.W. Patterson

      To Sarah

      1

      Bob James wasn't sure about the meta-verse and being a virtual being, it wasn't that he had doubts about the simulated world designed and engineered by the Artificial General Intelligence's called Aggies, the meta-verse had been around for almost a century and there was no reason to think that it wouldn't continue. And if you considered virtual beings in a simulation as human, then a third of humanity had voluntarily opted for the meta-verse lifestyle.

      And it wasn't because, like Bob, they had lived a long life and had no other choice. No, many had chosen the meta-verse early in their lives. According to the research that Bob had done, the meta-verse offered people freedom from aging with the promise of a vastly increased lifespan. Death in the meta-verse, if it ever came, was because it was desired or because something had gone horribly wrong with the supporting hardware. This freedom from aging and the indefinite lifetime it allowed made it possible to be anything a person could imagine, sometimes to good repute, sometimes to bad.

      The meta-verse wasn't like physical society, there weren't those that led and those that followed, unless they wanted to lead or follow. Each and everyone could be, if they wished, a separate and sovereign nation. Bit-nations, they were called. Because the meta-verse denizens needed nothing but a tiny amount of electrical power, the give and take of human life as it was experienced in the physical world didn't apply. If there were bad actors in the meta-verse, it was because they wanted to be that way and not because they were trying to alleviate some basic need or want.

      The vast meta-verse simulation created by the Aggies was flawless. Even though people could choose to return to their bodies if they didn't wait too long, merging the memories of their time in the meta-verse with old, no one had ever asked for such a thing. Most people communicated from the meta-verse to the physical universe for a short while but it wasn't long until the divergence between the two was too great to bridge and contact was gradually lost.

      Still, Bob wasn't sure. Three-hundred and fifty years of life was hard to deny. He was one of those that had never even allowed body implants to enhance his cognition or senses. Now taking on another body, even if just a simulated body, was as frightening to him as anything he had ever done. Still, he had no choice. The life-extension technologies had done as much as they could for him. Biology and physics still imposed a limit on life span and Bob had reached that limit.

      He would sleep tonight one last time in his own bed and they would take him tomorrow for the brain scan. Like the others, he could choose to return to his body if the meta-verse wasn't to his liking. But he was pretty sure he wouldn't, he was pretty sure he would be saying goodbye to his old body even if the meta-verse wasn't the paradise he expected.

      The body he would leave behind was tired, even past tired, of the struggle to continue in its present form. So it was the meta-verse or oblivion, he thought, as he closed his eyes.

      Civilization, like a human body, has an ebb and flow. Society advances in spurts, centuries of quick development, followed by centuries of slow change.

      After the Aggie managers took over, technology development exploded. And the effect on human civilization was profound and stultifying, a slow descent into stagnation resulted.

      Human initiative, at least where there were Aggie managers, greatly diminished. Most people saw no point in trying to compete with the Aggies. Those still with aspirations migrated to the outer solar system, Saturn's Titan, Neptune's Triton and Uranus Station which were under the auspices of the Solar Federation. Others built space habitats with the capacity to carry thousands, even millions while orbiting the outer planets. These adventurers brought with them what was left of human ambition and the desire for freedom. The Jackson family was among them.

      2

      Jacob Jackson looked through the small portal of the Starfisher into the blackness of space. After four weeks the second-generation fusion-powered spaceship, belonging to the Solar Federation, which had launched from Neptune's orbit was over halfway to its destination. Tharsis was a small body in the Kuiper Belt, named after the Martian volcanic plateau because of its own high plateau region. Tharsis was some 40 AU or 40 times the distance from the sun as the Earth at this time though its orbit was elliptical and

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