I listened carefully to the telemetry coming over the radio link. Garfield was over five light-minutes away and receding at a respectable 2000 km/s. The time signal in his telemetry fell behind at a steady, predictable rate. Well, I hadn’t really expected to prove ol’ Einstein wrong at this late date.
It was the other signal that I was excited about. I was receiving a subspace signal from Garfield that originated with the same telemetry, transmitted at the same time. But the timestamp on that signal still exactly synchronized with mine to the limit of accuracy of our systems.
I could tell I was grinning like an idiot. VR had long since become so realistic that it might as well have been real life. And that included aching facial muscles.
“Okay, Garfield. Radio telemetry has you coming up on six light-minutes away. Can you confirm my echo?”
“Yep. The return is just over 11.5 minutes behind my transmission.” Garfield’s voice held the same excitement. He’d been working with me for several years now on multiple projects, including this one. We’d turned into a regular Skunk Works, and this was our biggest breakthrough by far.
“Cut the transceiver loose, Garfield, and come on back. We’ll let the unit continue outbound for a few weeks and see what the dropout is like.”
“No problem.”
Without warning, Garfield popped up in my VR, sitting in his bean bag chair.
I jumped. “How the hell?”
He laughed at my reaction. “Hah! One-upped you, old man. Take that!”
“You integrated the VR into the subspace comms?” I felt a slow smile spread across my face. That was pretty impressive work.
His bobbing eyebrows were answer enough. Then he frowned in thought. “This tech isn’t going to make the space stations obsolete, is it?”
“Not a chance.” I shook my head. “We’ll have to wait until someone builds one at the other end, but theory says the signal dropout will be almost total after about twenty-five light years. We’ll have to use the space stations as routers.”
“The internet goes galactic!” Garfield laughed.
“Hey, with IPV8, we should be able to address every galaxy in the universe.” I knew I was preaching to the choir. After all, Bob, right? But I have a tendency to think out loud.
“That’s fine, Bill. When do you think we’ll be ready to transmit plans?”
“I think we should send what we have right now. It’s still clunky, but once they’ve built it at the other end, they don’t have to wait years for the next update.”
We grinned at each other across the virtual table. This changed everything.
Riker – April 2157 – Sol
The signal was audio only, and very weak. “Unknown ship, do you copy?”
I looked at Homer and raised one eyebrow. He shrugged. “As good a place to start as any.”
Activating my transmitter, I responded, “This is the starship Heaven-2 of the United Federation of Planets. Commander Riker speaking.”
There were several seconds of silence. “Uh-huh. Listen, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve just apparently averted a global catastrophe, so I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Our telemetry is not up to military snuff, but our systems tentatively identify you as similar to the Heaven-series interstellar probe that FAITH launched a couple or three decades back.”
“Guilty as charged. And to whom am I speaking?”
“I am Colonel George Butterworth of the United States of Eurasia Army Corps. Rest assured, commander, that our true position is obfuscated. If you attempt to destroy the source of this transmission, you will achieve nothing.”
The colonel’s accent was definitely British, and far too close to the cliché’d pronunciation portrayed in many American TV shows. I would have to be careful not to let Homer talk to him. I doubted Homer would be able to resist the urge toward mimicry. “Colonel, let’s not get off on the wrong foot, okay? We have no intention of blowing anyone up. We had a little disagreement with what appears to have been the last of the Brazilian Empire space navy. Now, I think it’s time to start fixing things.”
***
We had been in discussions with the USE military for three weeks now. I was faithfully forwarding recordings of everything to Bill. Negotiations were slow and cautious, mostly on the part of Colonel Butterworth. He had been very slow to accept the idea that Homer and I weren’t dyed-in-the-wool FAITH theologues. It took a very frank discussion in which I explained in detail the reasons for my atheism before the colonel really began to believe me.
The USE refugee camp that Colonel Butterworth had under his care consisted of about twenty thousand people, mostly civilians, who had been collected into an underground military installation when the space bombardments had started. The colonel guessed the global human population at less than twenty million at this point, although he admitted the uncertainty on that estimate was huge.
Some of the refugees were scientific personnel who had been working on a USE colony ship back before the war. In the 22nd century, things were constructed in virtual space first. Once complete, the plans were uploaded to an autofactory, which built the entire item using 3D printers, roamers, and nanites.
The colony ship plans were ready, needing only a space-based construction yard. And a destination. The colonel informed us that the Chinese and USE probes had launched shortly after Bob-1, but the USE probe had never been heard from again.
The colonel and I were conversing via video link, as usual. He knew that the Heaven vessels were staffed by replicants, as were the USE and Brazilian probes. However, we were the first to have a full-on VR avatar that looked and behaved like a human being. The colonel was having a little trouble accepting at a visceral level that I wasn’t ‘real’. I’d toned down the Enterprise theme and stopped making Star Trek references, out of courtesy. It blew me away that almost two hundred years after Shatner first famously didn’t actually say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” people still knew Star Trek. Now that’s a franchise.
At the moment, the colonel was bringing me up to date on recent history. If we were going to make an attempt to save the human race, I wanted to have the whole picture.