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“The gang’s all here!” I said. I reached into my pocket for a sample bag and got ready to very carefully pull the filter off the light box. That’s when I saw the fourth Astrophage. Just…minding its own business. A fourth cell. It was right in the same general cluster as the first three, on the filters. “Holy…”
Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to watch your food cook without melting your face off.
Astrophage hang out on the surface of the sun gathering energy via heat. They store it internally in some way no one understands. Then, when they have enough, they migrate to Venus to breed, using that stored energy to fly through space using infrared light as a propellant. Lots of species migrate to breed. Why would Astrophage be any different?
Ah, and that’s why Astrophage is so inconsistent on reacting to magnetic fields. It only cares about them at the very beginning of its journey and at no other time.
The path it takes—straight away from the solar pole, then sharply turning toward Venus—that’s the Petrova line. Our heroic Astrophage reaches the upper atmosphere of Venus, collects the CO2 it needs, and can finally reproduce. After that, both parent and child return to the sun and the cycle begins anew. It’s simple, really. Get energy, get resources, and make copies. It’s the same thing all life on Earth does.
“The Astrophage will gather energy at the ‘sun’ side and when they’re ready to breed, they’ll follow that magnetic field to the pipe’s elbow. They’ll see the IR light at the other end and head toward it. Seeing that light and being exposed to carbon dioxide makes them breed. Then the parent and daughter cells will go back to the sun side. Simple enough.”
Astrophage can travel at 0.92 times the speed of light. If it can go dormant and stay alive long enough, it could infect nearby stars. It spores! Just like mold! It spreads from star to star.”
“But if our sun dims by ten percent, we’re all dead,” I said. “Pretty much.”
Mass conversion. As the great Albert Einstein once said: E = mc2. There’s an absurd amount of energy in mass. A modern nuclear plant can power an entire city for a year with the energy stored in just one kilogram of Uranium. Yes. That’s it. The entire output of a nuclear reactor for a year comes from a single kilogram of mass.
Astrophage can, apparently, do this in either direction. It takes heat energy and somehow turns it into mass. Then when it wants the energy back, it turns that mass back into energy—in the form of Petrova-frequency light. And it uses that to propel itself along in space. So not only is it a perfect energy-storage medium, it’s a perfect spaceship engine.
“This is just crazy. In a good way, though. Is it internally producing antimatter, you think? Something like that?” “We do not know. But it definitely increases in mass. And then, after using light as thrust, it loses mass appropriate to energy released.” “That’s…! Dimitri, I want to hang out with you. Like—can we hang out? I’ll buy you a beer. Or vodka. Or anything. I bet there’s an officers’ club on this boat, right?” “It would be my pleasure.”
“For a one hundred thousand kilogram ship, we would need two million kilograms of Astrophage to get it to Tau Ceti. And, thanks to you, we now know how to activate the Astrophage and make it generate thrust at will.”
And I know why I’m here! Not just in vague terms like “Oh hey, the world’s ending. Make that not happen.” But very specifically: Find out why Tau Ceti wasn’t affected by Astrophage.
I use it to calculate the mass-conversion energy of that 6 grams…good Lord. It’s 540 trillion Joules. And the ship is emitting that much energy every second. So it’s 540 trillion watts. I can’t even fathom that amount of energy. It’s considerably more than the surface of the sun. Literally. Like…you would get hit by less energy if you were on the surface of the sun than if you were standing behind the Hail Mary at full thrust.
7,595 kilometers per second. Wow! A couple days ago, that was over 11,000. That’s what constantly accelerating at 1.5 g’s will do for you. Or “decelerating,” I guess. From a physics standpoint it’s all the same. Point is, I’m slowing down with respect to the star.
I’m twelve light-years closer to them than astronomers on Earth.
That means this journey took at least one thousand days. Over three years. Well, it takes light twelve years to make this trip, so it should take me a long time too. Oh, right. Relativity.
I have no idea how much time it took. Or, rather, I have no idea how much time I experienced. When you get going near the speed of light, you experience time dilation. More time will have gone by on Earth than I have experienced since I left Earth. Relativity is weird. Time is of the essence here. And unfortunately, while I slept, Earth experienced at least thirteen years.
So that means there’ll be an absolute minimum of twenty-six years of Astrophage misery on Earth. I can only hope they are coming up with ways to deal with it.
In any event, the trip took at least three years (from my point of view). Is that why we were put in comas? Was there a problem with us just being awake for the duration?
“Are they sure these genes cause coma resistance?” I said. “They correlate, but do they cause it?” “Yes, they’re sure. The genes are found in lower primates too. Whatever it is, it goes way back in the evolutionary tree. There’s speculation it might go all the way back to our aquatic ancestors that used to hibernate. In any event, they ran tests on primates with those genes and they survived long comas with no side effects. Every single one of them.”
Right on schedule, the engines shut off. The 1.5 g’s I’ve been feeling all this time vanishes. Gravity is gone. I panic. No amount of mental preparation would have worked. I straight-up panic. I scream and flail around. I force myself to curl into a fetal position—it’s comforting and keeps me from hitting any controls or screens. I shiver and shake as I float around the control room. I should have strapped myself to the chair, but I didn’t think to. Dummy.
It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull. Yes. I said hull. It’s not an asteroid—the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don’t occur in nature. It’s a ship. Another ship. There’s another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light—those were its engines.
This…this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft. Humanity isn’t alone in the universe. And I’ve just met our neighbors. “Holy fucking shit!”
there’s a “Blip-B” screen now. It shows the much smaller cylinder approaching at 8.6 centimeters per second. Interesting. That’s the exact same velocity I moved the Hail Mary a moment ago while flashing the engine to say hi. That can’t be a coincidence. They want me to have that cylinder, and they want to deliver it to me at a velocity they know I’m comfortable working with. “Very considerate of you…” I say.
I have to assume friendly intent at this point. I mean, they’re going out of their way to say hi and be accommodating. Besides, if there is hostile intent, what would I do about it? Die. That’s what I’d do.
Some quick math tells me the cylinder will take over forty minutes to reach me. I have that long to get in an EVA suit, go outside, and position myself on the hull for humanity’s first touchdown-pass reception with an alien quarterback.
Or maybe they’ll board my ship and lay eggs in my brain. You can never be sure.
The whole process took only five minutes. I’m ready to go outside. Interesting. I didn’t have to go through a decompression step. On space stations back home, astronauts have to spend hours in an airlock slowly acclimating to the low pressure needed for the EVA suit before they can go out. I don’t have that problem. Apparently, the entire Hail Mary is at that 40 percent pressure. Good design. The only reason space stations around Earth have a full atmosphere of pressure is in case the astronauts have to abort and return to Earth in a hurry. But for the Hail Mary crew…where would we go? May as
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I wait. No need to get greedy. If I paw at it too early, I might knock it off course and into space. I’d have no way of recovering it. I don’t want to look dumb in front of the aliens.
The Blip-A spins in space. It rotates end-over-end, probably at the exact same rate as the Hail Mary. I guess they saw me spin up the centrifuge and figured it was another communication thing. Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.
That’s the message. “We’re from the 40 Eridani system. And now we’re here at Tau Ceti.” But there’s even more to it than that. They’re also saying “40 Eridani has a Petrova line, just like Tau Ceti.”
But this is the interstellar equivalent of a stranger offering me candy. I want the candy (information), but I don’t know the stranger.
Do Eridians live in an environment hotter than the boiling point of water? If so, it proves I was right! The goldilocks zone is bull-puckey! You don’t need liquid water for life! I should be more focused on the “first contact with intelligent aliens” thing or the “save all of humanity” thing, but gosh darn it, I can spend a moment to be happy about being right when everyone said I was wrong!
Their move is taking a long time and I’m getting bored. Wow. I’m sitting here in a spaceship in the Tau Ceti system waiting for the intelligent aliens I just met to continue our conversation…and I’m bored. Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.
“That Mr. Einstein with his E = mc2. Very powerful stuff. We let the cooling system work on it for a few hours. Uses seawater. Will be fine.” I just shook my head in awe. In just 100 microseconds—that’s one ten-thousandth of a second—Dimitri’s spin drive melted a metric ton of metal. All that energy had been stored up in my little Astrophages. Slowly harvested from the carrier’s nuclear reactor heat over time by my breeder.
I stared at Dimitri. “If you’d set off all two grams of that sample at once…” He shrugged. “Fwoosh! We are vapor. All of us. Carrier too. Explosion would make small tsunami. But three hundred kilometers away from land, so is okay.” He slapped me on the back. “And I would owe you drink in afterlife, yes?! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The tunnel is about 20 feet long. Or 7 meters. Man, being an American scientist sucks sometimes. You think in random, unpredictable units based on what situation you’re in.
there’s a hull robot attached to it reaching out and doing stuff with its little robot hands. And yeah, its hands look like Rocky’s hands, broadly speaking. Three fingers. About the same size as Rocky’s hands. Probably controlled with a Nintendo Power Glove kind of thing inside the ship. Man, I’m old.
And on the other side of that wall is Rocky. He’s a spider. A big-assed spider. I turn to flee. But my rational brain takes over.
Rocky is smaller than a human. He’s about the size of a Labrador. He has five legs radiating out from a central carapace-looking thing. The carapace, which is roughly a pentagon, is 18 inches across and half as thick. I don’t see eyes or a face anywhere.
He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it. I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving.
I look to my alien counterpart. “You have twenty-nine times as much atmosphere as I do.”
Rocky bounces into the tunnel and spider-walks along the rails to the dividing wall. He’s incredibly graceful at it. Either he’s very seasoned at being in zero g or Eridians are just really good at climbing around. They have five hands with opposable fingers, and he’s an interstellar traveler, so it’s probably a little bit of both.
Eridians use base six. Of all the things I teach my students, numerical bases are the hardest to make them truly understand. There’s nothing special about the number 10. We have ten unique digits because we have ten fingers. Simple as that.
One Eridian second is 2.366 Earth seconds.
“Sound?” I say. “Do you ‘see’ with sound?” It would make sense. Humans use electromagnetic waves to understand our three-dimensional environment. So why couldn’t a different species use sound waves? Same principle—and we even have it on Earth. Bats and dolphins use echolocation to “see” with sound. Maybe Eridians have that ability, but on steroids.
The complaint is in the illegal use of copyrighted material and patented mechanisms.” Stratt shook her head. “It would take a ridiculous amount of time and energy to work out licensing agreements with every company. So we’re not doing it.” “I assure you, Ms. Stratt, you will comply with the law,” said the justice. “Only when I want to.”
Along with perfect memory, Eridians are extremely good at math. At least, Rocky is. As we worked our way through scientific units, it became immediately apparent that he can convert from his units to mine in the blink of an eye. And he has no problem understanding base ten.
Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.
