WB - 5. Short story based on a photo

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The ice cave

Wisps of steam rose gently into the frigid air from between the water worn boulders in the melt water stream bed. Icy fingers hung from the roof, collecting the steam, condensing it, turning it into stalagmite droplets that sparkled in the glittering light of the head torches of the two geologists who were slipping over the boulders.

There was an eery stillness but the vaulted ice above creaked and banged as the stresses in the ice cap moved and eased under the weight of ice. It was snowing hard outside so the weight was changing, increasing, adding to the stresses on the corbal roof of the cave as it supported the immense weight above it. The roof was being weakened by the steam from the flank of Grímsvötn below, melting the arch above.

‘I thing Grímsvötn is waking up,’ said Siggi.

‘The last eruption was in 2004 so another is due this year and by the look of the steam from the fumeroles, it could be sooner, rather than later,’ agreed Arne.

They picked their way carefully through the treacherous stream bed while keeping a careful watch on the roof of the cave. A vast pile of smashed ice nearly blocked their way. It had clearly recently crashed down from the roof. They picked their way around the pile and pushed the route out to where the cave narrowed into tunnel, the roof and side closing in claustrophobically. The noise increased as they climbed further, the melt water crashing and leaping in the stream bed. The creaking and groaning from the roof of the tunnel increased in intensity. The boulders in the stream bed crashed together as they imbricated. There was also the feeling of dread, an underlying sub sonic hum. It felt like Grímsvötn was stretching and intending her muscles, ready to burst a stream of molten lava from the mountain, ready to tackle the melting of the ice cap to start a Jökulhlaup on its way across the Sandur outwash plains to the sea. ‘The land of fire and ice indeed!’

As Arne and Siggi wriggled their way up the tunnel, deeper into the ice, the water flow increased, scouring out the ice to the sides of the tunnel into phantasmagorical shapes, designed by the laws of physics and rheology, crafted by the non-Newtonian Reynolds flow of the water.

Ahead they could just see the molten lava erupting silently from one of the vents ion the floor of the cave directly into the cold rushing water. This instantly cooled the surface of the lava so forming the pillow lavas that can be seen over much of Iceland. SIG and Arne were enthralled by the sight which is probably why they lingered too long in the danger area and were overcome by the sulphurous gasses that were being emitted from the vents as the volcano started to erupt. The temperature in the tunnel started to rise very quickly, melting the base of the ice roof.

The roof started a progressive collapse. Massive volumes of ice quickly changed to liquid phase and added to the considerable flow in the stream, quickly converting it to a river and then shortly to a raging torrent that further undermined the ice resulting in further progressive collapses.

There was now a full Jökulhlaup  in operation. It swept all before it as its flow volume reached that of the Amazon. The flow of course carried out the bodies of the two geologists. They were later found close to the sea, where they had been carried far out on the sandur. Their bodies were not recovered because the A1 road had been swept away and crossing the sandur was impossible in any sort of vehicle.

The eruption lasted only two days but in that time, many cubic kilometres of ice had been melted above Grímsvötn’s crater resulting in a deep depression in the surface of the ice cap, surrounded by many crevasses.

It took a week after the Jökulhlaup flow calmed down to reinstate enough of the road to allow traffic through.

It snowed regularly over the next few weeks, as if nature was covering up her gaping black wound on the ice cap.

The Queue

There was only Mrs Brown and the vicar from St Martin sin front of me so it shouldn’t have taken long to get what I wanted. I could have them without gift wrapping, that would save a bit of time as I didn’t want to be late for the match at the Karl Marx snooker club.

      I tried not to listen to what they asked for, it was none of my business but what would a vicar be wanting at this time of night and why hadn’t he gone straight to the event horizon anyway instead of here at the five corner shop?

      ‘I’ll just take a sermon today please Mr Patel, if that is your pleasure’ said the vicar irritably. I think he was a little cross with himself, which he wore on a silver chain, bouncing against his chest, with his belly shelfing enough to catch it if the chain broke and choked the monkey.

      ‘Mounted, rev?’ asked the shop keeper.

      ‘Always, it wouldn’t do to hide our lamp under a bushel would it?’

      ‘Err, whatever, that’ll be thirty five beatitudes Mate.’

      ‘Bless you my son,’

      ‘I haven’t sneezed yet, your Grace.’

      ‘Well, just keep it in your bushel until you need it then. Thank you. I’ll wish you a very good night Mr Patel.’

      ‘Any indulgences today, your Eminence?

      ‘Not a chance’ said Reverend Bishop, as he stomped off up the Mount to deliver his sermon on horseback.

            ‘Hi there Mrs Brown, we ain’t seen you around here for a while have we? I hopes you ‘aven’t been disloyal, doing your shopping at nouns-R-us or up at that new gerund place?’

            ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, it’s just that I haven’t been too good lately, I’m a slave to me bunyan so I haven’t been making much progress recently, just a pilgrim through life making do with adverbs, and treating myself to the odd coincidence on Sundays.’

            ‘Only teasing Mrs Brown, what can I get you this evening?’

            ‘I think I’ll try two wins and a coincidence please.’

            ‘Any special medium you prefer?’

            ‘No, I don’t really do paranormal, just standard is fine.’

            ‘OK, I’ll just drop a little telepathy in the brown paper bag then, OK?’

            ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have said that, it’s really not necessary.’

            ‘I know, but I do enjoy a spot of telekinesis, BBC2 mainly’

            ‘And what’s wrong with Emmerdale then?’

            ‘Well it’s not Corrie is it and it never has that nice prof Brian Cox in it.’

            ‘That’s ‘cos he’s a physicist.’

            ‘Could still leave BBC2 now and then couldn’t he, even if he is a necromancer. There’s no art blacker than Emmerdale to my mind.’

            ‘OK then, I’ll arrange it for you, but it will cost extra you know, plus tax..’

            ‘That’s fine, just take it out of my paradocs’

            ‘OK, see ya Mrs Brown.’

            ‘’Night Mr Patel, see you next week.’

It was now my turn but, before I had a chance to step up to the plate, a saucer landed just in front of me and demanded the cup that it had just one so where was it? Mr Patel had to admit that he had swatted it, thinking it was a fly. It was not one of the main characters in the film, just an extra…terrestrial. I knew then that I would have to charge him with cuppable homicide.

            Swatting flies soon becomes a habit with anyone who lives here in Cue. The town makes its living from exporting flies and dust by rail to Meekatharra and then on to Perth. You can’t see the flies for dust of course. The gold mines closed at the end of the war. A few men work at the Crosslands iron ore mine to the west. So iron or flies and dust just provide a living for this forgotten town of 328 people.

            ‘G’Day Bruce’ I said to Mr Patel as I arrested him.

            ‘Should get your shopping done before you arrest me, mate,’ he said – always the salesman.

            ‘Ok, I’ll take an infundibulum then, I don’t want to be late for the barbie do I?’

            ‘D’ya want the chronosynclastic or the antediluvian model?’

            ‘I’ll take the chronos, don’t try and fob me off with one of those old models that don’t work during the Wet. Can you deliver it to the snooker hall for me?’

            ‘No worries, mate,’ said Mr Patel as he struggled to rain in his sled dog.

            ‘Woooof,’ coughed the dog who was feeling a bit husky and a little horse.

            ‘Could you throw in a paradox please, I don’t think Occam is on duty tonight?’

            ‘OK, mate, that’ll be twenty seven dollars but, of course, it will all be free.’

Excellent service I thought, right on cue.

            I looked out the door to see if Mrs Brown’s coincidence had turned up yet. She had. ‘How nice to see you Mrs Brown,’ said Lydia. ‘I havent seen you for years. I didn’t know you lived here, you were the last person I expected to meet. How is your daughter doing, I believe she went off to Perth to marry that nice miner? How long ago was that? Must have been just after my second operation…’

I walked up Main Street after dropping Bruce off at the sheriff’s office to be charged, he was getting a little dim. The snooker hall was on the Left and the barbie was just being lit in the fire pit.

            That was my cue from the infundibulum, which had clearly done its job well, to join the queue to use the only available cue in Cue to take my shot before heading off down the pit to the barber queue for a shave, a horse burger and a cold tinnie.

Cue house lights and curtain.

966 words

Gadgets

      I’ve been a Service Engineer, working on 3D printers since I finished my apprenticeship in 2015. I was a little green at first and had to suffer the usual Newbie tricks like swapping a UV resin for the base starch mix so producing rock hard objects rather than the programmed choc chip muffins. I got over all this nonsense and saw myself as a true professional who could sort out most problems from my home, using the print anywhere ® software my Company had developed, in a very short time.

      Part of my job was selling and installing upgrades – I enjoyed this part, mainly because I got sales commission but also I enjoy supplying customers with what they want. Most of our income comes from the materials we supply which is why the printers themselves are so cheap. It is the same system that was used in the 20^th century when companies would almost give the 2D printers away to get the sales of the ink cartridges. We don’t supply ink of course but a range of material flasks that allow the printers to produce anything from the choc chip muffins I talked about earlier, through engineering parts for cars and home appliances, prosthetic body parts to bespoke doseage pills of any drug you can imagine. You buy a prescription over the internet then feed the code into the printer and out pops the pills.

      Some clever guys started modifying the software so they could turn out the other type of drugs but we easily stopped that by inserting a couple of lines of code in the Bios that added a sneeze inducing chemical to the mix so anyone with a sneezing fit was automatically arrested. The cold and flu viruses had, of course, been wiped out in 2017 so there was no danger of an innocent cold sufferer getting imprisioned.

      I went to the annual sales conference in 2018, at the Bristol Centre. We were shown the new temporal chip® that had been developed exclusively for our range of printers by our in-house tech guys. It was a very clever idea and did exactly what they said it would. I know this because I saw several demos. Our Company now had a Unique Selling Point – the world’s first true 4D printer.

      ‘So what?’ I hear you ask, ‘Any 3d printer can produce any item you want so what’s the use of  the extra vector in space-time?’

      A good question that has an interesting answer.

      Everything wears out eventually, right? So therefore you design each item with a dimension along this fourth vector – in other words each item you produce on your printer will have a built in life. This is ideal for food of course as you can set the shelf life so the product diappears just before the goes off and becomes unfit to eat. ( This system struggled with some French cheeses… )  This facility can also be used for many engineering materials. You can make car ignition keys that disappear a week after the MOT is due so that a car cannot miss it’s due date. The chip is remotely programmed from DVLC at Swansea so that there is no cheating. Aircraft throttle levers have a similar system so that the engines cannot be run up to full power if they are due for an overhaul. There are inumerable possibilities like that so our printers were starting to make the world a safer place using our Limited-Life technology®.

      Every silver lining has a cloud however and they certainly started turning up. If all these items disappeared as soon as they reached the end of their design life, where did they go? Unfortunately that is a null question because the answer is that they disappeared into their future. But what about the other part of the vector I hear you ask, what about the dimension in the future direction? That, of course depends on the original setting in the source programme. Some careless programmers had set this dimension to a very small value so, for example, after a car key had disappeared as planned, it was likely to turn up again at some random time in the near future. As for the place, that would be where it disappeared from so keys started appearing in mid air in all sorts of inconvenient places and even more inconvenient times. I think you can probably imagine some of those and the chaos it caused…

      Then there was another breakthrough by George Dirac who was working in the temporal development lab. He is a maths wizard who was playing with imaginary numbers one day – you know the ones –‘operator j for example which is the square root of minus one and has the effect of rotating vectors through 180^o around the y axis.           Anyway, he was trying out different equations for the patented algorhythms we use when he had a eureka moment. He changed the polarity of the fourth vector by incorporating j in the algorhhythm equation. This had the effect of keeping the vector dimension the same but reversing it’s effect. Rather than objects being produced on the printer and then lasting for a finite time in the future, they now travelled to the past. Young George had invented a time machine!

      He quickly got some techs to build a suitable printer. He placed a choc chip muffin on it and pressed the ‘start’ button. We all watched in amazement as the muffin slowly dematerialised and the materials flasks started filling up.

      Everyone crowded round George, shook his hand and congratulated him but I had a thought, ‘what about the application of this technology? I could see it being the end of our Company. I was right – it goes something like this.

      A customer buys one of our new 4D reverse temporal® printers, which we sell at a loss to get the future sales of the base materials. The customer goes home and makes all sort of things that he thinks he needs. He runs out of materials, but instead of ordering some more, he puts some of his new gizmos that he has found that he doesn’t really need on the printer and operates it in reverse mode. His material flasks fill up and he can now make some new gizmos, that he thinks he needs more than the old ones.

      This was great for our green credentials as all items produced on our printers could be recycled indefinitely. The problem was that the sales of our base materials rapidly dropped to near zero.

      We reduced the orders to our suppliers in line with our sales and they reduced the orders to the mining companies and farmers in line with their sales to us. The mines shut down, the farmers went bankrupt, the transport companies folded, the taxes dries up so hospitals and schools had to be closed, the economy went into deep recession and unemployment soared.

      What happened to our Company I hear you ask?

We couldn’t sell any base materials now so we tried putting the price of the printers up and selling those at a profit instead. Didn’t work – I am sure you know why?

      Our customers were scouring the old landfill sites, collecting any old junk, as long as it had been made on one of our printers, taking it home and reverse printing to get the materials but then…

      George Dirac had set himself up as a freelance software engineer ( hacker ). He had reverse engineered the source code to make our printers and was selling this to anyone so our ex customers could now print their own printers.

And what did I do?

      I took delivery of a top of the range printer, in lieu of my redundancy settlement and set up as a shoe repairer. People would come into my shop with a scruffy pair of shoes and the original software. I’d take the shoes, put them them through the printer to recover the materials, modify the software to change the design to the latest fashion and then reprint them. Bingo! A pair of brand new shoes in the latest style. I also trimmed down the materials used by about 10% so after recycling ten pairs of shoes, I had enough to make a new pair which cost me nothing, also in the latest style.

      Well, everyone has to make a living and Tempus Fugit…

Snow

Snow

‘Daddy… daddy… DADDY.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter, why are you shouting at me?’

      ‘Cos you were ignoring me, Mummy never ignores me.’

      ‘I was busy doing something so I didn’t hear you.’

      ‘Mummy always hears me, even when she is doing two things at the same time.’

      ‘OK, Miss Andry, that’s enough of your aggressive feminism, eight is too young for that.  How can I help you?’

      ‘Is it true what my best friend Fiona says?’

      ‘What does Fiona say?’

      ‘She says that her daddy says he knows everything. Do you know everything?’

      ‘I know as much of everything as Fiona’s daddy, in fact more because he’s a muppet.’

      ‘What’s a muppet?’

      ‘Never mind, Gorgeous Daughter, what were you going to ask me?’

      ‘Why is snow white?’

      ‘Well I guess it is because she is tired from looking after seven dwarves.’

      ‘No silly, I mean why is snow white when rain isn’t?’

      ‘Oh, that’s an easy question. The fairies paint each snow flake white on its way down from the sky.’

      ‘Where do they get the paint from?’

      ‘Same as we do, from B & Q of course.’

      ‘I’ve never seen any fairies when we’ve been shopping for paint.’

      ‘That is because B & Q only run their fairy price promise on Thursday mornings and we usually go on Friday evening or Saturday morning.’

      ‘Oh, OK.’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘If each snow flake is painted white by the fairies, why isn’t there a lot of white paint left on the garden when the snow melts?’

      ‘That’s a very good question.’

      ‘When you say that it usually means you don’t know the answer.’

      ‘Of course I know the answer, I told you, your daddy knows everything.’

      ‘So what’s the answer then?’

      ‘Well, err, it’s…/

      ‘You don’t know do you. Wait ‘till I tell Fiona. She’ll tell her muppet daddy.’

      ‘Of course I know the answer, I was just teasing you. Don’t tell Fiona that I called her daddy a muppet will you?’’

      ‘OK. Well, what is it then?’

      ‘If you stop stamping your feet, I’ll tell you. The white paint dissolves into the earth so you don’t see it.’

      ‘What does dissolve mean?’

      ‘When you have a cup of tea, you put a spoonful of sugar in it don’t you?’

      ‘Yes, so?’

      ‘The sugar is white, just like snow flakes but when you have finished drinking your tea, you don’t see the sugar at the bottom of the cup do you? It is just the same with the white paint.’

      ‘Oh. OK’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Where does the sun go when it gets dark at night?’

      ‘It goes behind the earth so we can’t see it.’

      ‘OK, when you put me to bed at night, you or Mummy read me a story.’

      ‘Yes…’

      ‘Then when you have finished the story, you turn the light out.’

      ‘Yes…’

      ‘If the sun goes behind the earth at night, where does the light from my bedside light go?’

      ‘It goes back along the wire to the plug in the wall socket and then back along the wires in the wall.’

      ‘So it’s in the wires all night waiting to come out?’

      ‘Yes and if you turn your light on at night, the light comes back down the wires and the light comes on.’

      ‘If I turn the switch off at the wall socket, the light goes off’

      ‘Err, Yes.’

      ‘If I turn the switch off at the wall socket, unplug the light and then switch the wall socket switch on again, will light come out of the socket and make a puddle of light on the floor?’

      ‘Have you tried it?’

      ‘No, I don’t want to make a mess on the floor.’

      ‘That’s right, please don’t try it, we don’t want to have to clean up a big light puddle do we?’

      No, I suppose not.’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Does the sun really go behind the earth at night?’

      ‘Well, it looks like it but it is really the earth turning once a day that makes it look like that.’

      ‘So the earth is spinning?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But when you take me down to the swings in the park, you tell me to hold on tight when I have a go on the roundabout as otherwise I would fall off. Why don’t I fall off the earth if it is spinning like a roundabout?’

      ‘Because the earth is a lot bigger than the roundabout, it has what is called gravity which pulls you on to the earth. So when you jump in the air, you soon come down to stand on the earth again.’

      ‘But if I look under my shoes, there is no string to pull me down with.’

      ‘That’s because gravity is a force which no one can see. It is like invisible string.’

      ‘Oh, OK.

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Will you always answer all my questions?

      ‘Yes, of course I will.’

      ‘Why are boys different from girls?’

      ‘Err, go and ask your Mummy.’

      ‘You don’t know do you?’

      ‘Err, no.’

      ‘Fiona’s daddy doesn’t know either, she had to ask her mummy.’

     

Writing challenge 1st September 2012

Choices – Light or dark?

I’d had the idea for a long time, perhaps ten years or more. It started out as almost a philosophical theory and then gradually morphed into a mechanical representation of that idea. It went something like this.

      You are sitting in your favourite chair reading a really good book. You know the one, the one you wished you had written but knew that you really weren’t capable of producing. It is one of those late autumn dreamy afternoons where the evening arrives earlier than you had expected. What happened to those long summer evenings that seemed to go on late into the night when you were a child, at home during those never ending, magical summer school holidays? It starts to get dark. It becomes increasingly difficult to make out the print so what do you do? You reach up and flick a light switch on and the problem is solved and you carry on reading for as long as you wish, regardless of the sun’s desertion to more southerly parts of the world.

      Later, when you have finished reading and there are other demands on your time, you casually flick off the light switch and darkness returns to the room. Is it just the lack of sunlight that makes it dark or is there an unseen dark star in the sky that produces the darkness? Call it, perhaps, anti light in the same way that physicists say that matter is balanced by anti matter and gravity is balanced by anti gravity. Confucianists have thought this way for millennia with the idea of everything in nature having a balance, as exemplified by the concepts yin and yang.

      Think back, to picture yourself sitting in the chair. Perhaps it is earlier in the afternoon and the sun is streaming through the windows making it unpleasantly warm and too bright for your eyes as the sunlight reflects off the page into your eyes, making you squint. You feel sleepy and decide to have a snooze but it is too warm and bright.You have only one option, pull down a blind or draw a curtain to screen you from the sun. Why can’t you lean over and flick on the dark switch?

      There would be many benefits if you could. One would be that you would not need to buy blinds or curtains. Another is that the dark, being antilight, would cancel out the light, and therefore the electricity used to produce it. This would mean that as your use of dark during the summer increased, it would cancel out the cost of the light that you used during the winter. You would become truly carbon neutral – for light and dark anyway – I’ll come to the rest of it later, maybe.

      I spent another five years working out the technology to generate, distribute and control this new dark energy. It was a lot easier than I thought as it was possible to use the National Grid to distribute the dark energy from the production sites, which were of course the same power stations that produced the electricity for converting into light. All it needed was a small modification at the power stations to produce the dark energy from the waste heat. Coal fired power stations are only about 33% efficient so there is plenty of waste heat to use.

      It was easy to use the existing grid to carry the dark energy in the same way as you can download an e mail while carrying on a conversation on Skype, using the same broadband connection, at the same time. I never have understood why the two don’t get mixed up and you end up talking to your e mail account – I am just happy that it works.

      I now had the idea and the system designed,. All I needed now were backers and customers. I decided to go on television and pitch to some millionaires on one of those animal alliteration shows; Sheep’s Shed, Pig’s Pen, Horse’s House or some such. There are many of them these days on television. My pitch went very well, Duncan and Theo started fighting over their bids as soon as they saw the full potential but it was Peter Meaden who came up with the best offer. I grabbed it and the rest is history, as they say.

      That is why there is a three way switch in every room in your house that gives you the choice of how light or dark you want the room.

      What next, you ask. Well, light switches sometimes have dimmers so I have developed a brighter system for the dark switches. It is now in production and will be launched early next year. I am now looking at heating and cooling systems and perhaps a secondary application of domestic water heating and refrigeration.

      I had a passing thought the other day about gravity. I was reading about Isaac Newton’s trinary mathematics system and I wondered if…

Writing challenge 25th August 2012

Theme - Time.

I looked up as a crow cawed excitedly from one of the tall pines. I remembered my Dad explaining to me that, ‘ if you see a rook, it’s a crow but if you see a bunch of crows, then they’re rooks.’ It didn’t make sense to me when I was a kid but I could work it out now. ‘With age and experience comes wisdom’, was another of his sayings, he was into heuristics even way back then. I cawed back a reply to the rook. Always be friendly to rooks, you never know who they are in real life.

      It was snowing as I walked through the trees, quicker than walking around them. It was the sort of lazy, big flake, snow that IKEA would put in their self assembly snowmen kits, if they decided to sell them. I could see my footsteps when I turned to look behind me. That was the first clue. As I completed the first 360 degrees of the turn, I saw there was more to go, I had to turn through 1080 degrees before I was back facing the way I was going.

I could feel the coldness running through my veins. I guess this is what prompted the snow dream. I gradually woke up. I knew it wasn’t the usual waking, after a short nap or even an overnight sleep because I had a beard, my hair was very long and my fingernails had grown to more than 2 cm. The ‘droid extensionals withdrew from my veins, arteries and brain where they had been feeding and monitoring my body. ‘Always look after your body,’ I say, where would you be without it? In one of those new fangled life extension nutrient flotation tanks without your body, just an existing brain. That’s not for me, my living will says that when my body dies, so will ‘I’.

      The stiffness gradually disappeared as I slowly came back to full wakefulness while taking care of the hair, beard and nails. Nearly felt human again. It took several cups of turkish to complete the job as I read through the briefing notes from my Oppo on the Holoread^® image floating in front of my eyes. I never did get on well with the Hypnoread^® system, where the words turn into thoughts in your head. I like thoughts to at least feel to be mine, not some stranger’s implanted in my brain. Mary thought she was a bit of a comedian so she always finished off her daily briefing report with a joke and a ‘Have a nice day’. Today’s joke was the one about the Indian guy and the polar bear in Mumbai. I am sure you know it so I won’t bore you by telling it again.

      I grabbed my icomm and started doing the checks around the ship. I dialled up the G a little. I knew it took a bit more energy but it suited me to have a it a bit stronger than Mary’s setting. I liked about 0.3g while Mary was happier with 0.15. I would dial it up later to 2.5 for a while when I used the gym. This made the exercise more effective without the ship having to carry any weights.

      I passed through the sick bay and gave the lab machines a little to do by letting them grab a blood sample from me. They were properly grateful and promised to have the report ready when I passed through after doing my rounds. They were true to their word and said that all was well with my blood balances, I just needed a top-up of Chronopeptide Hydrochloride. They insisted using ridiculously long words, everyone else in the universe that I know calls it Fast^®. This drug has the effect of slowing down the physical body while speeding up the perception of time. This is a similar effect to getting old as then time appears to speed up as your body gets slower because of muscle wasting. The difference here was that the dose I was on made time speed up by a factor of one thousand. This was essential as it made the trip to the Proxima Centauri system appear to last for twelve years rather than the twelve thousand or so it would seem to be otherwise.        My icomm told me that we nearing the half way point and that the Flip would happen on this shift. We had been accelerating at 0.0037g since leaving the Earth system about six thousand years ago and now we had reached our maximum velocity. We had to reverse the ship so that the ion motor would now start the deceleration that would continue for the next six thousand years until we reached orbit around one of the exo planets in the P. Centauri system. It also meant, of course, that we could now start to communicate with Earth for the first time since leaving – our ion trail had made any radio communication impossible. I wonder if they had forgotten all about us? It wasn’t a case of turning on the radio and saying, ‘Hi, it’s us.’ The telemeter system would send out a directed radio burst that had all our mission information compressed in it. It would take about ninety five years to reach Earth so, if anyone was listening and could be bothered to reply, we could expect an answer after about 190 Sol years. I wondered if it would be Mary or myself on shift when a reply came?

      We were the third in a series of life ships sent into the universe from orbit above the Euro space elevator at Kouru in  French Guiana. We were named ‘Curiosity’ after the Mars Rover that found the first extraterrestrial life in 2014. The first had been called ‘Asimov’ after the science fiction writer, who first proposed the possibility of using an ion drive for interstellar voyages. The one before us was named Heinlein after another science fiction author. He was the one who developed the concept of sleeper ships to reach the stars. The old launch site at NASA in the Americas had been destroyed in the food riots of 2123. It had been privatised in 2015, sold to some guy called Branston but he made a right pickle of it and finally went broke. The site ended up as a dump for space scrap that was contaminated with aluminium oxide from the spent rocket boosters.

      The Earth had been in a mess when we left and the only reasonable thing left to do to try and ensure the survival of our species was to launch a series of life ships, each carrying five thousand frozen young colonists to seed the planetary systems of our nearest star neighbours in our galaxy. It is thought that the probable success rate was less than 0.01% but the survival chance of the human race on Earth was put at a lot less than that. Humans had ensured that the sixth mass extinction on Earth was inevitable and, as top predators, they would be the first to be wiped out. Cockroaches, though,  had a good chance of surviving through it. Good luck to them, they had been through it all before and deserved better this time.

      There was nothing left on Earth for me, the car crash had taken everything I valued, so I volunteered for the life program. Because I had some piloting experience and knew a little about astrophysics, they offered me a pilot’s job. I grabbed it as it gave me a chance to explore some of our corner of the universe and a promise of what seemed like eternal life, well twelve thousand years seems like eternity when it stretches out before you.

      I had never met Mary, of course. Only one of us was awake at any one time. It had been decided by the Mission Psychologists (MPs) that it was better that way as they  predicted a that a twelve thousand year relationship between only two people had a 97.7% of ending in murder. Incidentally, the same equations could be used for marriage on Earth. I could see their point as Mary annoyed me even when she was asleep, with her silly jokes and artificial friendliness. I won’t kill her for it though, I think, maybe, at the moment.

      Fast ^® had been the second chronomorphic drug developed. The first one was called, wait for it, Slow^®. This had been developed to maximise the time perception when enjoying pleasurable activities. This minimised the cost in cash and resources of an over populated planet. This way, a five minute trip to, say, a museum would feel like two days but would allow a much greater footfall of people without overcrowding. Football matches were split into twenty sections of five minutes with a one hour break in between each section to allow the stadia to empty and refill with a new crowd. There was a cost to the individual of course in the wear and tear on the body as it carried out all its functions so much faster. A quick calculation will show that this results in a reduced life span. This helped a little with the massive overpopulation problems – but not enough.

      I started all my usual activities, I was getting quite set in my ways after all this time. I continued studying for my Open University degree in Creative Writing. This was one of the reasons I can’t kill Mary at the moment, however much she annoys me, as she marks all my assignments and will hopefully be awarding my degree, eventually. Perhaps I had better start laughing at her jokes… I spent some time in the gym, followed the personal workout planned for me by Brenda. After a shower, I ate one of my favourite meals from the 4D organic printer. Steak and kidney pie with roast potatoes and garden peas, with gravy of course. Banana custard for desert followed by a long read of one of the millions of books available from Brenda’s memory, with several cups of turkish. Not a bad life although somewhat lonely. I sometimes put on a holocube^® recording of my family but I find that increasingly difficult as time goes on. They are all long dead by now of course so it seems a little strange to be having a conversation with them, even though I know of course that Brenda generates their replies.

      There was a call from Brenda. ‘Alarm, the ship will be flipping in ten minutes.’ I didn’t have to do anything. Even though both Mary and myself had the title ‘Pilot’, the ship was run and piloted by Brenda. We were only there to follow her instructions if something manual needed doing that was beyond the reach of her extensionals. The flip was started as predicted, not that I could feel anything, the delta V was so small that it was below my perception and Brenda kept the g the same. The manoeuvre was planned to take twenty seven hours and then we would be decelerating, albeit very slowly, until we reached orbit around our new home planet. The ship was turned by small chemical rocket thrusters near the front of the ship while the ion drive was temporarily turned off.

      ‘Alarm, Alarm,’ warned Brenda, ‘bow thruster malfunction.’

I ran the diagnose app. It came up with a nonsensical result. Rocket  fuel level zero, it read. I ran the program again and got the same result. I asked it to detail the root cause and it showed, Leaking main fuel valve. The liquid rocket fuel had been slowly leaking into space over the last six thousand years until the tank was empty. This was very bad news as without turning the ship, there was no way of slowing down. It could only carry on at its present velocity or I could turn the ion drive back on and continue accelerating until the fuel ran out.

      Neither of these possibilities appealed to me. Brenda was only programmed for one trajectory and one destination and so would soon be lost, in space. The only positive thing I could think of doing was to wake Mary and share the problem with her to see if she had any ideas. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds as I had to override several computer safety systems to wake her early and to stop Brenda sending me to sleep. The most difficult thing, however was to prepare myself to meet a stranger who I had been sleeping with for six thousand years but had never met. I just knew she liked terrible jokes. A woman with hidden shallows as I described her to myself.

      It had to be done. I set out the problem and recorded it on a Holocube^® so that she could read about it and get used to the idea before she had to face the ordeal of meeting me. Yes, I am self aware enough to realise that, if I don’t like her, then she almost certainly doesn’t like me.

      Brenda put me to sleep for twelve hours. I hoped that would be enough time for Mary to read my Holocube^® and perhaps even come up with a solution. The three of us would discuss it when I woke up.

      I felt the cold liquid in my veins again so I knew it was wake-up time after a Fast induced sleep. This time there was a face floating in front of me. As my brain slowly started up on two cylinders, coughing and spluttering, metaphorically at least, I realised that, of all the women in the universe, this must be Mary. I searched through my memories for a creative, witty comment, found one, transformed it into audio speech and said, ‘Hi.’

      ‘Hi’, said Mary, she clearly was suffering from a similar brain block to me, but at least she didn’t start with a joke.

      ‘Can you leave me for about half a solhour, to give me a chance to wake up and become nearly human, I’ll meet you in the crew lounge, OK?’

      ‘OK, Dave’ she said and wandered off.

‘We can’t do that, Mary,’ said a male voice as I walked into the crew lounge.

      ‘Why not Steve, ‘asked Mary.

      ‘We have no reserves of liquid rocket fuel on board, so we cannot use the bow thrusters to change our orientation.’

      ‘Yes, we do, Brenda,’ I said as I poured a cup of my drug of choice.

      ‘Where would that be Dave,’ asked the computer in its Brenda voice.

      ‘How many space suits do we have on board,’ I asked the room.

      ‘I think you know that we only have one, Dave,’ replied Brenda.

      ‘What has that got to do with anything,’ questioned Mary.

      ‘A space suit has thrusters built into it. Calculate if there is enough thrust available in that suit to turn the ship, please Brenda.’

      There was a pause, obviously a complicated calculation.

      ‘If that thrust is applied right at the nose of the ship, there is only enough thrust available to turn the ship through seventy three degrees, we need the full one hundred and eighty to do the job so we only have just over a third of the necessary. It just cannot be done.’

      ‘Thanks for that calculation Brenda but you have got it wrong. What about using the dimension multiplying effect of a chronomorphic drug? You remember what happened in my dream in the forest when I tried to turn round to look behind me? That was in a Fast^® sleep. If the pilot in the space suit had taken enough Slow^® then the same available thrust could achieve a rotation of nearly two hundred and twenty degrees. We only need one hundred and eighty so there would be enough to propel the guy in the suit from the airlock forward to the nose of the ship and back again.’

      ‘That’s true, Dave,’ said Mary, who had been thinking about the other implications, ‘but that much thrust wouldn’t be necessary because it would be a one way trip. You have forgotten that the ship’s hull is radioactive from the ion drive and so the guy in the spacesuit would be dead long before he got back to the airlock and the safety monitors wouldn’t allow the door to be opened anyway, to prevent contamination of the ship. It would be a suicide mission.’

      ‘What is it now then? Who is going to get out of this alive if we don’t do something? We will both be dead and the ship will run out of power in about ten thousand years time. The five thousand sleepers in the cryo hold will then die without waking up and even Brenda, or Steve as you call him, will have no power and so will shut down.’

      ‘All this is true, ‘said Brenda. ‘What do you suggest Dave?’

      ‘I suggest Mary and myself have an enjoyable meal together while you carry out the make ready routines on the suit. You can then give me a calculated dose of Slow^® before I suit up and then get on with the job.’

      ‘That’s sexist Dave,’ said Mary, ‘why do you assume that you will do the job, why not me?’

      ‘Two reasons, Mary. The first is that I thought of the idea so I claim it as mine and secondly you would be a greater loss to the mission as you know more jokes to cheer up the colonist’s when you wake them up in six thousand years time and tell them they have got a lot of work to do. Now let’s decide what to have for dinner.’

We had agreed that Mary should be asleep while I got on with the flip mission. She would need to reserve her waking time for any issues that came up during the rest of the journey and there was nothing she could really do to help, Brenda would be able take care of anything that came up – hopefully. Brenda had checked over and warmed up the space suit while Mary and myself enjoyed our first and last meal together. Surprisingly, we got on very well.

      ‘OK Brenda, let’s get on with it,’ I said when we had finished eating, I didn’t want to string out any goodbyes.

      ‘OK, just don’t ask me to open the pod bay doors, Dave.’

      ‘Mary does the jokes around here Hal, remember?’

      Following the first rule of leaving a space ship, I clipped my safety line on to the rail running along the length of the ship and then nudged myself along to the nose with short bursts from the suit thrusters. Once in place I wriggled around, following Brenda’s instructions over the radio, until I was oriented exactly right and clamped on to the hull.

      I took my last opportunity to look out into the deep, cold, indifferent, infinitely lonely blackness then asked Brenda to start the thruster firing sequence she had calculated. Once the thrusters started firing she would use her in-suit extensionals to inject me with a fast acting narcotic to knock me out followed by a lethal dose of potassium cyanide. Better that way than slow suffocation as the suit’s oxygen supply ran out while suffering the onset of radiation sickness.

      ‘Goodbye, David. I love you and I’ll always be with you.’ I knew it was Brenda, the ship’s computer, speaking and she had just clipped and stitched some footage from one of my favourite Holocubes^®, but I kidded myself it was Brenda, my wife and soul mate, talking to me through the parsecs and kilo years that separated us.

      ‘I love you too Bre…’

Weekly Challenge 14th June 2012

Forgotten children

The government minister heaved his bulk into the radio studio. He sat across the desk from John, who was his designated interviewer today.

      ‘It will be about seven minutes before your interview starts minister. Would you like a cup of coffee while we wait?’

The minister eyed John’s mug of suspicious looking mud and refused the offer. He was used to some food with a drink and nothing was available. He passed the time listening to Evan who was trying his best to coax some English language from the lips of Robert who was reporting on the Euro crisis. He had done this many times over the last couple of years so he should have been word perfect but instead managed to managed to sound like a recent immigrant from Bakuu who was just starting his mandatory English lessons.

      Wilfred watched as the clocked slowly moved on and prepared himself for the usual cut and thrust with John. The Production Assistant on the other side of the glass in the control room counted down by folding his fingers down and then pointed to John to start the segment.

      ‘Thank you for coming on the Today program minister, to help us to understand your new proposal to help these problem families that you have talked about.’

      ‘No problem, John, it is always a pleasure to come and talk to you.’ He oozed, faking  sincerity with his usual skill.

      ‘Tell us, minister, how many problem families there are in the country and how much they are costing the tax payers.’

      ‘We in the government have calculated that, including social services and police time, it adds up to something like 238 million pounds a year John to pay for these 120,000 families.’

      ‘That is certainly a huge amount of money, minister, what is most of it spent on?’

      ‘A lot goes on social services taking children into care, rehab programs for drug users and alcohol abusers and, of course, the necessary police time to cope with the crime resulting from these abuses and the cost to the NHS coping with the consequent diseases.

      Our idea is that, by shifting some of this spend from paying for the after effects to providing more early support for problem families we will eventually reduce the money required.’

      ‘Is this something like “Sure start” , the child centrered initiative from the last government that the coalition has scrapped?’ asked John.

      ‘Not at all, the central plank of this new initiative is to get these problem families back into work by training them in the basic skills of time keeping, taking instructions and realising how industry and commerce works. If you have never had a job, it is very difficult to get to a place of work regularly and to understand what is required of you in the work place.’

      ‘So what happens to all these newly bright eyed and bushy tailed job seekers when they go out and find that there are no jobs to be had. We are after all, in a recession, you know.’

      ‘Yes, that is true, the last Labour government just threw money at the problem without sorting out the underlying issues so what happened?’

      ‘You tell me minister.’

      ‘It meant that unemployed people suddenly received a lot more money and so, when jobs became available, they were snapped up by recent immigrants allowed in from the EU under Labour’s lack of control of our borders. UK residents realised that they would be worse off if they took a job and so they stayed at home.’

      ‘Oh, I understand now minister, it is all the fault of the last government?’ asked John.

      ‘Not completely of course, but they certainly have a lot to answer for and the coalition now has to pick up the pieces and we are determined to get to grips with the problem. We have to do this while reducing the deficit so we don’t have any spare money to play with. As the economy starts to improve, we will encourage people back into work, so increasing their self esteem as they provide for their families. No one will be worse off taking a job. They will always be better off than staying on benefits. We will be setting up a task force to identify those dysfunctional families and put actions in place to help them. This will prevent the problem trickling down the generations.’

      ‘That sounds very laudable, minister, but how will you identify these families?’

      ‘There will be a range of identifiers, John. These will include, poor performance of the children at school, truancy, free school meals, unemployed parents, alcohol and drug abuse and poor parenting skills. No one of these items on their own, of course, show a problem family but taken together, we have found that they are a fairly reliable set of indicators.’

      ‘I see, so lets take an example, erm, say a family spends a lot of time in a pub with their young children, setting a bad example on alcohol use and then goes home leaving their eight year old in the pub because they had had too much to drink, presumably, to remember to take them home. Would that qualify as a dysfunctional family under your set of identifiers?’ asked John smoothly, trying to be helpful.

      ‘Well, yes, of course that is exactly the type of family that we would be targeting. Are either of the parents unemployed?’

      ‘In the example I am thinking of, the father has a temporary job but he is likely to be unemployed in a couple of years time.’

      ‘Well, in that case, even more so, it is essential that we target a family like that before they cause even more trouble,’ insisted the minister.

      ‘Ok then, if I give you the address of that family, would you get the officials in your task force to go and help them?’ asked John with an innocent look on his face.

      ‘Yes, I would be very keen to have that address and we will get started working with that family straight away.’

      ‘I have it here minister, it is 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London. Do you need the post code or the surname of the family?’

      ‘Err, umm, no, err, I don’t think so,’ stuttered Wilfred as he felt his ministerial career gurgling down the drain. ‘That is ludicrous, of course, there is no way that the Camerons are a dysfunctional family.’ He said desperately trying to regain some sort of dignity as his face turned red and sweat started dripping down his face. ‘You just proposed some spurious indicators just to trip me up.’

      ‘No minister, I just wanted to show you that if you are posh and rich, you can get away with anything. If that family had been poor and unemployed, I am sure your task force would have been around to sort them out and probably have taken their children into care  and put the parents into an alcohol rehab clinic before you could say Ian Duncan Smith,’ summarised John. ‘Thank you minister. Now it’s time for sport with Rob.’