Midway: Chapter 4

  “Dhika?  I need a favour.”

  “Sure Johannes, what can I do for you?”  Dhika answered with a smile.  Her real name was Sadhika after her grandmother Sadhika Sengupta, one of the four principle founders of the mission.  Since before she could remember though, everyone called her Dhika.  She was the perfect image of her grandmother, matching her Arab complexion and jet black hair, as well as her brown eyes which always seemed larger than should be possible.  She shared all of these features with her mother and grandmother, but Johannes thought she was much prettier than her namesake had been.  If he was thirty years younger (though probably more like forty if he was honest with himself since she was thirty-three and forty was closer to the true age gap between them), she would have to beat him off with a stick, or so he imagined.

  “Well it should be an interesting challenge for you I think.  This scroll,” he held it out to her, and she took it from him, looking it over and then pulling it apart, “is password protected, I can’t access it over the network.  I’m guessing that it’s had its transceiver removed and… well I need to see whatever's stored on it.”

  “Password protected hunh?  How quaint…” she mused as she looked it over and the same password prompt came up for her, “Ok, I’ll see what I can do, this shouldn’t take too long if you want to hang around and wait…” she offered, reaching for her tools.  She started to pry at key points in the shell to rip it open and remove the back panel from one of the scroll’s posts. 

  The two were alone.  It was late in the evening, and the rest of her staff had already gone home for the night.   During the day there would have ordinarily been several people working in the busy outer office.  Dhika and her staff were responsible for several technical systems which required careful monitoring.  Johannes and Dhika were in her small and private windowless office off of the main area where she worked with her staff.  It was separated by a glass wall and sliding door which with a thought’s command could be rendered opaque with an electric current.

  “Oh I’ll stick around, believe me.  I have no intention of letting that thing out of my sight.”

  “I see…” she cooed as she got more and more curious.  With a sharp ‘pop,’ the casing on the post which had the data port embedded in it came off, exposing the internal electronics.  “Now, once I wire up an interface, I should be able to set the computer to run through the permutations and find the right code.”  Her brow furrowed as she focused on her delicate work.  As fond as Johannes was of Dhika, he still greatly missed the elder Sadhika.  She had been something of a godmother to the New Horizon; the original matriarch.   She’d died when he was in his early thirties and it had been a very sad day indeed.  She was someone everyone had looked up to and sought advice from, including Johannes himself.  

   

  A lot of people on the ship, pouring through the archives in their free time, had found subjects about life on Earth which fascinated them for one reason or another.  For Johannes it had been things like criminology, forensic psychology, psychopathy, and deception detection.  These were of course factors which contributed to him being selected to be the principle investigator of the murder.  He was simply best qualified as far as anyone could be qualified that is, to investigate a horrific murder in a place where any crime of any kind was completely unheard of.

  Young Dhika however, had become fascinated with the oceans of Earth, and the idea of travelling on and under them.  Perhaps the inherently claustrophobic sensation of having lived one’s entire life on a ship in deep space had something to do with her fascination with the idea of sailing the wide open seas.  Most people found the idea of wide open space on the surface of a planet a little scary, but Dhika didn’t.  She had images and models of all sorts of ocean craft about her office, ancient sailing ships of war, nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as coal steamers from the European industrial revolution era.  When she was younger she loved printing out the individual pieces, assembling them into the models and carefully painting them.

  On board the New Horizon, Dhika was also in that select group of people both trusted with, and burdened with, an especially sacred responsibility.   She and her staff were responsible for the preservation of the ship's database, its stored archive of information from Earth.  It was considered one of the most absolutely essential elements to the mission being a success.  It was no less critical than the ship’s propulsion system, or its life support system, or the food and water cycle which all of the crew depended on, without any of which all was lost.

  Information, specifically the unique human ability to accumulate it over time, and to snowball that knowledge and know-how from one generation to the next, is what allowed humans to go from hunter-gatherers to interstellar colonizers in only less than seven millennia.  It was not possible for everything that needed to be known for this mission to be successful, to be known at once by the living members of the mission at any phase of it.  It was necessary to store most of it, from the most cutting edge synthetic chemistry and particle physics, to the more terrestrial and ancestral skills of actually being able to live off of the land and establish a colony on their new world.   They needed to take the knowledge of the whole world with them, all of the collectively received human knowledge and know-how of every age.  If this information was corrupted or lost in some way, the mission itself could easily be lost.  It was that important.

  So, a sophisticated system of multiple redundant backups was developed and established on the ship.  The primary storage medium was the quantum storage which the ship’s sophisticated quantum computers used on a regular and continual basis and taking up very little space due to the nature of the technology.  These were quite reliable, but still vulnerable to a single system failure totally destroying the entire archives.  So, the twelve zettabytes of data in the ship’s archives were backed up in two completely different and separate storage mediums.  

  The primary backup system was the oldest of all technologies, DNA.  The technology had been perfected on Earth decades before they left as a result of their total mastery of biotechnology.   Strands of DNA were simply transcribed from scratch with the binary ones and zeroes being transposed with the base pairs that constitute a DNA sequence.  Properly maintained and without the messy complications of being a reproducing organism, information could be stored in this way for centuries before inevitably breaking down, and even then, one only needed to re-encode the same information into a brand new master complex.  This form of backup also took up very little space, no more than a small closet.

  The very last line of digital defence, was a system which was physically robust.  Where the quantum and genetic storage could both be lost entirely with a sustained lack of power (for which there were back up and redundant power systems as well), the redundant backups would require complete physical destruction to be lost entirely.  Unlike the more transient forms, the physical data backups could float through empty space unpowered for a million years and still be as usable as they were the day they were created.  The system was so important that a full quarter of the interior space of the ship was dedicated to storing the thin 20 by 25 centimeter plastic orange sheets.   Paper thin and regular shaped they stacked neatly, and their vault required no power or life support.  No markings could be seen on them with the naked eye, but under a powerful microscope a binary code could be seen.   Ones and zeroes were microscopically etched into the material, and with a special machine the archive data could be scanned back into the main computer in the event of a catastrophic failure of the primary data storage systems. The archive itself and the resources committed by the mission to the preservation of knowledge, was thought to be one of the most important identifiable differences between this generational starship mission and the two religious ones which had preceded it.

   

  “So where’d you find this?” she asked as she worked

  “I can’t tell you.” He stated flatly.

  “Oh come on Johannes, you know that just makes me want to know more.”

  “I’m sorry,” he offered unapologetically

  “Tell me,” she demanded again, looking up at him with her characteristic hint of confident intensity.

  “No,” he answered again.  He meant it this time and she could tell.

  “I always knew there was a reason I liked you,” Dhika said with a smile as she returned to her work.  “You’re not afraid to tell me no, I think that’s part of what makes you a good patriarch.”

  “I know dear,” he answered coolly while secretly breathing a sigh of relief.  Her heritage intimidated him a little but he tried to never show it.  “And thank you,” he added with a smile.  “So how long do you think it’ll take you?”

  “Got it,” she decried with satisfaction.  “I’m done now, I can’t tell you what the password was, but I removed the protection.”

  “Seriously!?  Wow, that was fast!  Thank you my dear.” Johannes offered with a warm smile.

  “Well, I’m just that good!”  She winked at him, “ok, let’s see what we’ve got on here…”

  “NO!!”  His loud and sharp decrial rather startled her; it was a command of a force and urgency she was unaccustomed to hearing from him.  “No.  I mean… what is on there may be very sensitive information, and I need to look at it first, and alone.  Before anyone else can see it.”

  “Fine…”  She was obviously disappointed, but she dutifully obliged nonetheless.  She handed the scroll back to him with a slight pout on her face.

  “Can I take that interface you built with me in case I need it?” he asked.

  “Suit yourself.”

   

  Twenty-two years ago…

   

  “Alright class, settle down.  Settle down now.  I know there’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get started,” their teacher Zack pleaded.   Every year on the same day, New Horizon pointed a telescope at Earth in case they had any urgent messages for the ship outside of their regular transmission schedule.  They were still about seven years away from the Earth’s next scheduled transmission in response to New Horizon’s last message sent back to their home planet almost five years ago.

  “Obviously the big news out of yesterday’s surprise transmission from Earth was that the federalist movement succeeded, and that a one world government was established for the first time in Earth’s history.  Can anyone explain how that happened?”

  As was often the case, Dhika’s was the first and only hand to rise, and the teacher pointed to her.  “United Nations reform?” she asked.

  “Yes Dhika, very good.  The New Commonwealth, American Solidarity, BRIC Consortium, and European and African Unions, all finally negotiated comprehensive UN reforms together.  Who can tell me what the big primary reform that everybody’s talking about was?”

  Again Dhika was the only one to raise her hand.  The teacher smiled at her but asked, “anyone other than Dhika?”  Anaru raised his hand and Zack pointed at him this time.  “Yes, Alissa.   What were the two major reforms?”

  “Reform of the Security Council?” The girl tentatively offered.

  “Yes, exactly right.  The Security Council was disbanded and in its place a senate was established.  The old members were replaced with those organizations I mentioned a moment ago instead; except that the BRIC was split into India and China individually while Brazil and Russia Joined the New Commonwealth and the European Union respectively.  From what I can understand of the treaty, the new senate was reorganized into ridings of up to about twenty million people, ensuring appropriate representation by population in the senate while people were represented by their often much smaller countries in the general assembly.  That way more populous countries will have more power in the senate, but that’ll be balanced by less populous countries having more power in the general assembly.”

  “The most important change was that the Security Council Veto was abolished in favour of a simple majority of the council but left to the individual supranationals how each vote within their territory would be cast.  Some opted for direct democracy in each riding on each question, while China for example has stated that their central government will make one vote for all of its seats collectively as a voting bloc.  That’s where your project comes in.  There’s twelve of you in the class, and there are now six major groups in the new United Nations Senate.  I’m going to pair you up, and assign each pair one of these groups to study.  I want you to research the voting system each has come up with and explain why.  I want you to dig into their political history and arrive at a thesis about why they made the decision they did.”

   

  Two hours later, Dhika and Tycho were sitting in the dining hall doing research.  They each had a large half meter across scroll fully deployed and propped up in front of them, and they were reviewing the political history of the American Solidarity.  As the United States of America declined in the twenty-first century, it ceased to be the lone superpower in the world, and settled into a new level of parity with the other world powers both economically and militarily.   Insecure about their declining status and power amongst the emergence of the other supranationals, and having pivoted to a more Pacific orientation in the last century, it formed its own supranational organization with its traditional Pacific military allies, namely Korea and Japan.  

  After the Nuclear Tragedy of 2042, in which a misinterpreted surprise massive meteor strike in Israel precipitated a nuclear exchange between Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and India, a new peace was established in the Middle East and South Asia to prevent any such thing from ever happening again.  There was also a renewed push in the global community to deal with rogue states which still posed a serious threat to international security and stability.   For example, the combination of their reckless nuclear capacity, well documented humanitarian crises, and most importantly a newly confident China no longer feeling the need to preserve it as a buffer state, resulted in in a unique international consensus on North Korea.   In a joint operation between China, the New Commonwealth, the European Union, and the American Solidarity, in what would later come to be known as the One Day’s War, the North Korean regime was eliminated altogether.  Operations began in the middle of the night, and by the next day’s sunset, the North Korean army was completely pacified and could no longer offer any military resistance whatsoever.

  Some of the surviving members of the ruling regime accepted reconciliation offers and became intermediaries between the North Korean people and the veritable army of aid and social workers which descended on the country immediately following the war.   They had been preparing for this moment of reunification for nearly a hundred years.  Kim Jong-Un at sixty-seven years old, was tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity.  He was convicted, and died ten years later in a United Nations prison in Belgium.  It took a few generations, but over time the political and cultural rifts were healed, and the Koreans were once again a united and collectively prosperous people.

   

  “This is stupid,” Dhika declared, leaning back and rubbing her eyes.  “Why are we spending this much time learning about Earth, it’s so far behind us now, it’s so not important anymore!”

  “Are you kidding?  Earth is amazing, how can you say that?” Tycho asked, surprised.

  “No, of course I’m serious!  We left Earth behind for a reason.”

  “Oh yeah?   I don’t know why.  Earth doesn’t seem that bad from what I’ve seen and read about it… certainly better than living on this… this ship.”

  Dhika was mortified; she’d never heard anybody badmouth the ship or the mission in any way before.  “How can you say that?” she asked.

  Tycho turned his large rigid scroll towards her.  On it was a repeating video clip of golden wheat plants gently swaying in the wind, large and clear in the foreground, but stretching out into infinity over the horizon with a bold and clear blue sky above it.  “That’s the North American Prairies… doesn’t that… doesn’t that excite something in you?  Doesn’t it make you… sad somehow to look at it?”

  “No… why would it?” Dhika asked.

  “I don’t know… but it does me.  When I look at an image like that, or… or this,” he held his scroll up again, this time showing a video clip taken from a small boat on the amazon river with the same clear blue sky visible through the break in the canopy offered by the river, which wound out in front of them with lush greenery on either side, “it makes me sad.   I want to run through that field in a straight line as fast as I can until I’m so tired I fall over.  I want to see what’s down this river beyond the next bend; I can only imagine what it’s like to go anywhere and not know exactly what I’m going to see.  I, I want to stand on the edge of a cliff and feel the wind!”  He took a moment to settle down, and then continued.  “I’ve been all over the ship, I’ve seen every corner of it… and I’m already so bored.  I look at this and I can’t understand why we left Earth at all, why we had to come on this... this death ship.  Doesn’t it bother you at all that you were born on this ship, that you’re going to die on this ship, and that you’ll never have any chance to know anything else?”

  Dhika was doubly mortified.  For one thing, she came from a world where the ship they lived on was the manifestation of a noble vision, the embodiment of the very best of everything humanity had to offer, shot off into space with one great effort.  Where she came from, she was special too by association, just for being a part of it.  But here was Tycho, referring to the New Horizon as a death ship.  Uncomfortable as she was with what he said though, she became curious about this boy she’d never paid much attention to before.  She was curious how he could feel that way, and about how differently he must see things, to have such a different perspective.

  “No, Tycho… no I’ve never felt that way… about any of it,” Dhika stated, sounding distant.

  “Well I do, at least… sometimes I do I guess.  I don’t know why it doesn’t bother you at least some of the time.  It should.”   Tycho seemed to think that was the appropriate end to their exchange and turned his attention back to his large scroll on the table, searching the archives for their research project.

  Dhika scrutinized him as he refocused his attention back to their work.  She lingered in her look as she attempted to process what she’d heard.  He’d contradicted her and had been completely unapologetic about it; she was not used to that.  Dhika was as close to royalty as one could be on the New Horizon.  She was the product of the great Sadhika Sengupta impregnating herself with the genetic material of Neil Sagan, another legend of the mission who had died during the ship’s construction.  There were others on the ship who were descendants of either In-Su or the original Captain Tynes, but she along with her mother and brother, were the only three onboard to be directly descended from two of the mission’s principle founders.  She was special.

  So special was she, that for the most part she was used to being deferred to and doted on by the crew.  People tended to be apologetic when they contradicting her, or when they told her that she had to stop something or that she couldn’t have something.  The thing was though; despite how she was treated she simply didn’t have an aristocratic bone in her body.  She was after all, the product of two incredibly talented, ambitious, and intensely curious people, and as a result she had never been very comfortable with being treated the way she always had been.  She never really understood what felt wrong but she didn’t really identify a problem in need of understanding either.  In her way, she’d been waiting a long time for someone to be unapologetically honest with her.

  And here was Tycho, grandson of wildcards even, telling her that she was wrong and that there was something deficient about her if she didn’t understand him.   She liked that.  Not the being insulted part obviously, but the unapologetic nature of his honesty.  He was unashamed of his opinion, even to her.  She liked that.  He cracked open a door of honesty where she hadn’t known a closed door had been before, and allowed a sliver of truth to shine through.  She liked that.