I didn't belong here.
No, that wasn't entirely true, I had much more freedom of movement than most people now around me, more options. I could, theoretically, go almost anywhere. So it wasn't a matter of where .
I didn't belong to the now .
All because I made a Cat2 jump over 12,000 light-years and my time "smearing" circuit failed. And when the jump became instantaneous instead of taking a finite amount of time the annoying happened: Again, I'd passed into the past.
I'd been making a jump to a planet close enough to our galaxy's center where a science team was keeping an eye on the central black hole(s). This time, though, a trivial defect in the Cat2 jump engines placed me out of my time and time-line.
You may think this isn't a common experience, but, in some ways, when it does happen, a Universe (well, time-line) will lose a ship... and another time-line gains it. Upon emergence a new Universe forks. It's been argued that this is why zero-point energy exists but no one has ever found a real answer.
But this isn't all that damn funny. I've been through this before, Both ways. It's never been much of a problem, before.
Yeah, before.
Before.
Now I was in a time... BEFORE. I'd jumped far enough to place me into the pre-history of the human race. Or, at least, the pre-history of humans as the prime movers within the galaxy.
It's been a long history.
We "jumpers" (or jump-jocks, conductors, are-we-there-yets) have used a phrase from an a old movie: "hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops" since the very beginning. I never knew why it was supposed to be funny. I was to learn in my new "here and now".
Seeing what dusting crops was really like was not all that reassuring, of course.
Actually, the truth of our favorite phrase turned out to be more true than can easily be explained. You see, there's more than one variety of superluminal means of travel, and, so, multiple "kinds" of hyperspatial dimensions.
We know how to find and use Category One "jump" points that are implicit in the rules of various "forces" in the Universe, of which those formed by gravity are the most easily detected and utilized. The points are relatively fixed in space by the various forces that formed them.
Multiple forms of Category Two point-to-point jump drives, allowing near-instantaneous transitions between points. The most popular and efficient form of this drive requires an ability to "smear" time during the jump to ensure there's no jump into "another" time-line. We call any drive where the exit point is part of the entry process a Category Two. These are the most popular drives in use since they are both energy and time efficient.
There are even Category Three drives where one enters a hyperspatial realm where one "drives" between the entry and exit points... and can change course at any time.
Jumping into "sponge space" qualifies as a Category Three.
It's this last, diving into sponge-space, that is like dusting crops; you have to skirting "low" on the edge of the grid, the back-bone of all the space-times, for power and control.
We don't like to use sponge-space for any long-hauls though, with some kinds of passengers, we really don't have a lot of choice. In this almost pre-historic time I was trapped in, I got to watch a real crop-duster at work... and got scared just by watching.
I'm not really a coward, you know. I've been in sponge space more times than I care to recall and wish, at times, that I could forget. Finally seeing what real Crop-Dusting consists of was far more of a fright in thinking about how tough it must be to fly without being a part of the plane.
Diving into sponge-space has never been fun, all right? But being merged into a ship makes it a lot better than herding a collection of loosely-connected parts through the air.
Returning to my dilemma, this particular jump "felt" shorter than my experience indicated it should have; the unusually short time between entry and exit worried me ... and I discovered, upon my re-entry to normal space, that the research facility that I'd been aiming for was no more.
All right, technically, it wasn't a case of it being "no more"; it was more a case of "not yet". I'd retreated into the past due to this defective jump.
There were a bunch of us who rotated the job of jumping information, supplies and people back and forth for over a thousand years along this particular route. This time I was fortunate that I'd not brought carried any passengers.
I am a human being, you realize. Yes, still. There are, I am told, approximately 200 million or so of us humans active in the galaxy, mixed in with a whole collection of other life forms.
There's nothing unique to humanity that gave us a monopoly on interstallar transport; many other races had jumpers of their own kind and we all tended to get along better than can be easily explained.
Oddly enough, we humans are one of the few truly omnivorous and intelligent life-forms in the galaxy. Our seemingly innate desire to explore worked well as we took to our Ships. And nowadays almost all of us humans are Ships.
We'd basically taken the galaxy by storm; being merged into a Ship and part of its structure, we made hyper-spatial jumps accurately and efficiently. All other transportation technologies based on archaic "ships" became almost instantly obsolete.
And if you believe the above bullshit you don't know any of the histories.
No, the advantage to a human-flown starship only starts with use being part of the ship. The magic trick was the support tech, mostly in the nanotechnology to perform the supportive and symbiotic merger between the mind and not-quite-metal. Our human cells are kept alive and connected despite being spread throughout the ship, fed and nurtured by the various systems to support our dissolved human bodies.
We didn't need a "fixed" hull. Our ships were more like an amoeba, taking on whatever shape was needed for a particular job or to fit the requirements of our drive mechanisms. Our advantage included the ability to manage so many differing varieties of hyper-drives, building and disassembling each type of drive on an as-needed basis. We were small, quick, accurate and, above all, people .
Humans aren't really unique, of course. Some research has implied that our physical and psychological make-up put us at the edge of a bell curve of survivability. Other races most like us have tended to snuff themselves one way or another. We've seen other intelligent omnivores start out well and then kill themselves off. Intelligent carnivores seldom survive to the first glimmers of self-awareness.
As near as I can tell from our history, it was a miracle that we'd not managed to snuff ourselves out, too. I have my suspicions that humanity was really outside the "survival curve" and only the accidents that led to the survival of a small colony on Mars made the difference that set us loose on an unsuspecting galaxy.
Now... ummm... now, way in an alternate future-- we carried most of the commerce for the galaxy. As individuals, we rotate through assignments so that we don't get too stale and tired from repeating the same runs. We also have some fun; over ten percent of our time is unstructured, allowing us to visit almost anywhere. We humans have poked into and prodded open more of the galaxy than most other races in "recent" memory. As one can imagine, this hasn't always been a good thing.
I learned the story to go with this recently.
Pandora should have kept her chastity belt on so that her box could not have been gotten at, much less opened.
So, given this bad jump, I knew what had gone wrong almost right away; I'd been one of the jocks that had made this particular trip to help establish the research base. Beyond the databases, I had personal knowledge of what to look for and had little problems recognizing how deep the shit was.
Every time we emerge into realspace the drill is the same: Localize ourselves based on pulsars and stellar patterns. Well, until the match doesn't work. Then we pay a lot closer attention.
Of course, with a change of 120 centuries in time, there were discrepancies. Some of them were surprising until I realized their full import. The confirmation of my fears was not comforting.
Some of the charted pulsars were missing.
At this final confirmation I knew I was in deep shit. I stopped all motion and went through a full diagnostic, finding that the primary tool to keep me within "my" universe said it was working... but wasn't. This is why none of the backups had kicked in.
Now I was stranded, coming to a time before three of the supernovae that had formed "known" pulsars for this area had blown. Their progenitor stars looked, well, interesting, but I wasn't in the mood to do pre-nova studies all over again. Having been "too fucking close" to a supernova even once was seventeen times too many.
Despite the distraction of the pull of curiousity to watch some big fireworks when one of the three stars would explode, it was still a shock to consider how I was stranded deep in the past. If I was still flesh and blood I would have sighed, but with my mind (and brain cells) spread across my Ship I didn't have time for that.
I set three of my maintenance AIs to work in performing the detailed diagnostics necessary for all the various systems. Hopefully no AI internal faults would be present as well.
In order to figure out exactly where I was relative to Mars (my birthplace, and, so, "home" to me), I pondered the next step. There were a few things I could try, but I needed to make sure I was still able to safely travel. While all of the micro-diagnostics were running my concentration on where well, actually, I knew closely enough where I was. It was when I was that was now important.
One nice thing about the technology we've had is that the ability to store humanity's knowledge base and history is very, very deep, and the number of AIs built into me as a Ship that I was part of were designed to support the kinds of queries I needed to answer.
There are limits, of course, imposed by the fact that the colony on Mars on the Moon didn't have all of the reference material that was lost when Earth died.
It took almost a week of analysis (and re-checks, I kept disbelieving the data) to finally accept the pulsar-based information. All of the detectable charted pulsars were spinning faster than "normal", so, with the accumulated observations of their rate of deceleration, I was able to compute when "now" was.
Working back, the best estimate is that my long jump without the smear circuit had thrown me into a temporal foldback equal in time to the number of light-years I'd just crossed.
And that was a lot of light-years, and now years into the past. Doing the sums to get a date that predated not just the first interstallar flight but my own birthdate was... daunting.
This wasn't that surprising an event; it was an annoyance. Normally, this isn't much of a problem, we live with these kinds of foldbacks, but, this time, the sheer magnitude of the jump into the past meant I was likely to be the only one of my kind in the whole galaxy.
Granted, I'm usually alone, melded into a Ship, my very nervous system stretched out to the very tips of the spines, allowing me to feel and drive myself through space and the various forms of hyperspace.
We live with the fact that this particular Cat2 "jump" drive has a history: There were quite of few copies of me (and a bunch of others) in the time-line I'd left because of temporal foldback. Ships do disappear and that was considered, if not normal, at least not wildly abnormal. It's the cost of using one of the simplest of the hyper-drives that is almost the first kind a star-faring race develops.
Temporal foldbacks can't really be undone, you realize. Return to normal space causes a fork in the time-line of the Universe and so a new set of Universes will evolve with new histories.
I was stuck in this new reality, now.
Being that I couldn't "go home" again, I had to make a new home in this fork I'd fallen into.
Although It's been hypothesized that a proper dive into sponge-space could possibly return me to the fork of reality from which I'd come, that would just form another fork when I emerged. In my own mind I saw the effort as an exercise in futility, all because the likelihood to become further lost was nightmarish.
So, knowing the risks, we pilots knew our only choice when things like this go wrong: just grin and bear it. Become a member of the "local" space-faring time-line. Join in carrying the load of commerce. These events tended to average out.
We've never really contemplated this great a jump back in any time-line to a time when humanity was not merely still stuck in it's own solar system but to a time when it was still confined to just one planet.
What was I expected to do?
With the knowledge that history forks anyway, there's no need to rule out "interference with the past". I had more latitude than I usually do, here and now.
So I knew where I was, of course, as well as a rough idea of when I was. And the whole human race was still on one small planet... and not the planet where I'd been born.
Before I decided to move out I wanted to be sure I'd run through all diagnostics on every portion of the Ship I was part of. I won't bore you with the process which took almost three martian years, and I found that five systems had failures that escaped the "normal" level of diagnostics I (and other) would normally run.
With everything up to "normal" I rolled the Ship back up into the tight ball needed to make a Cat2 jump and jumped the 21,754 light years to reach "Sol"... and Mars.
When you jump that kind of distance there are always going to be accuracy issues; it's inescapable. Going from the higher gravitational potential near the galactic center to the more sparse regions where the star my birthplace orbited resided increases the error factor.
So my miss was by approximately 1,200 light years... which was actually a pretty good. I unfolded all of the drive spines and opened a jump point into a more "regular" Cat3 hyperspace. I am almost always never in the mood to deal with sponge-space diving.
Working without local hyperspace beacons is not fun but I managed to get within a light-year of earth's sun on my first break-out to normal space.
The second break-out was in the outer zone of the Solar System. Hopefully no one was watching for the pulse of X-rays that is emitted from hyperspace when I jumped back into normal space.
I took my time spiraling into the inner solar system, busy trying to re-learn everything I'd need to understand the solar system of my birth as it currently stood.
Re-reading my own biography-- well, twelve thousand plus years worth of it-- didn't fill me with enthusiasm, but I soon realized that the important part was the beginning.
I was born human, you realize, on Mars. As a Ship I still carried everything needed to re-build a human body for me, I'd just never really needed one in all this time of "being" a Ship. While all of my neurons would be re-collected into one place and merged into a reassembled body, if I really wanted to, I was not quite ready to risk my "real" body. I had other options, of course, and the one I chose was to assemble my "standard" avatar which would appear fully human. I'd never needed any more than that in all my time as a Ship.
Even reproduction doesn't require a full human body; the gonads get partially reassembled and gametes produced for delivery to a center where they'd be combined with gametes from a ship of the "other sex", the zygotes grown and raised either in a creche or in a human family that has chosen to stay "just" human. It is not unknown for a Ship to step out of space and stay fully human to raise their own offspring.
But in the here and now I wondered whether I'd need my real human body given the lack of reproductive infrastructure.
The sudden memory of what it was like to actually mate as a human being told me that I wanted to consider doing it the old-fashioned way at some point. So, part of my desire to re-constitute my human body was that I missed sex. Even without sex hormones delivered to my brain cells, I still thought of that world full of humans...
Admittedly I could no longer ever be merely human; there would always be a connection to the Ship as part of me. A Ship was part of both who and what I am. I couldn't even think of turning away from spacing. Once one has flown the pull of the vacuum between the stars is almost irresistible.
I've also heard that the lure of "real sex" is irresistable, too. My own activities had been few and, I am told. likely unsatisfying.
As I spiralled into the human solar system and looked over the planets I'd worked around in my "infancy", I had plenty of time to assemble an avatar as I approaced the inner planets.
My home world seemed empty without people. I missed seeing beacons and feeling a flow of radio traffic. It hurt to know I'd arrived too soon to find a settlement on Mars; I had to look at Earth which brought back many remembered anxieties. I had little choice but to bend my trajectory for the birthplace of humanity rather than my own birth.
Finding a living planet where all I'd ever seen was a blue, red and gray lifeless world was a wonder. I've seen other planets claimed as earth-like and never understood why they were called that.
Now I knew.
It's been a long time since the Earth was this beautiful, with rich greens of vegetation as evidence of a life-bearing world. Even Mars at it's best had never looked so fine.
Earth's future wasn't pretty, of course. The nanotech war of the late 21st Century had killed off all life and forced us to quarantine the Earth as a dead world. I remembered the histories when I was growing up on Mars telling of the religious zealots who preferred to kill everybody so that "God could sort them out". Some humans were so sure they'd achieve paradise through this genocide.
It was believed the utter destruction of all life on earth hadn't originally been the plan. OK, that's possible, but given the weapon they chose, it wasn't likely they had a clue.
With the loss of the Earth as a going concern we'd had to build our own paradise. On Mars, on the moon, into the outer systems...
Also necessary were the deflection fleets to keep anything large from striking the Earth; we didn't want to take a chance that the nanotechnic agent could escape the earth on the "splatter" of a large meteoric strike. It was best to keep the nanotechnic horrors as contained as possible at the bottom of a gravitational well. There's been thousands of years of talk about dropping the Earth into the sun to cut the cost of maintaining the fleets.
But this earth-- a living world, with greens of forests and algae-- was a beautiful sight.
As a Ship my skin is not particularly reflective so I had little worry that I'd be detected visually. It was also easy to set "my skin" to absorb rather than reflect microwaves to avoid detection by "radar" equipment. I could feel their probes now and then and knew enough to deny any echoes. Granted, even at my most careless, I'd be pretty unlikely to provide them much of an echo.
I had historical knowledge stored away along with the total creative output of mankind (well, what was left on the moon and Mars when Earth went off-line) within me. Archives from before the extinction of life on Earth were thin, however, and much of the later material would likely be obsolete, now.
After all, I was here.
Listening to the babble -- and seeing "television" -- being delivered via radio waves was educational; there was a lot of material about the Earth missing from our records.
It was 1969 "Anno Domini" or "AD" (whatever that meant) down there as I circled Earth in a high orbit. I was there, able to watch via "television"...
Words cannot express the feelings that ran through me.
If I could have, I would have had tears in my eyes as I I watched one of the most momentous events in the history of the human race as it was broadcast on their television. My own sensors had tracked the various pieces of Apollo 11 as it had left Earth's orbit. The trajectories had stood out from the rest of the "junk" locked into earth orbit.
So, yes, I wished to have been fully human for that moment; tears would have flowed as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, the first human to do so, and ...
Neil blew his lines.
What? Where was that " a " in a "small step for a man"?
The full impact of this moment in history was broken by how it diverged from the historical of the event. I'd found the first obvious fork in the time-line.
Regardless... none of us jumpers would have failed in wanting to weep at witnessing man's first touch of another world.
To have arrived for this moment...
What historical records I had were thin but not reassuring. They did agree in that there were many weapons down there capable of killing many, if not most, human on the planet.
Heck, if I got to close to a detonating thermonuclear weapon while unprepared, I could be damaged.
I thought about the future, as in what would be a reasonable set of priorities for me.
Humans were endangered. Without viable settlements on other planets and moons they would be extinct in just over a century.
I am still a human being. Sure, I'm a Ship, too, but, first and foremost, I was born human. As such, I felt it important to protect the human blood-line in the here and now. So I did think about it. This would take some time.
There were plenty of humans down there, of course. I could dip down and steal some-- hell, I could steal quite a few of them from down there and no one would really notice! Males and females, of course, though I wanted to try out sex with some of the females first. With these humans I could make more Ships.
Then all I would need do was dip into the right place-- be it an ocean or jungle on earth, for instance, or one of Jupiter's moons, wherever... and, given a human on board in the right place, my Ship would reproduce itself, fissioning a new child around the seed-- a human being.
So if I felt that making more Ships was a good idea, well, I'd come to the right place.
But I had to choose some humans before I could get my Ship to replicate itself...
This was going to be interesting.
In the two years of orbiting Earth I learned that even the best of my historical records were, well, inadequate. Some of these differences were likely to be "jitter" as the world line I was on forked it's way through time. Apollo 13's crew, for instance, survived in this time line, instead of dying in a blow-out as their stack broke up, from my own historical records. This basically destroyed continuity in other areas since the "United States" didn't do what my own time line's did. In this time-line there was no need to build up a sustainable infrastructure to retrieve the bodies. The infrastructure needed to make my own birth in this time line possible wasn't being built.
This told me that the likelihood of the human race surviving the appointment with death was, for the most part, zero.
There was a wealth of information here available via radio and television; I had to nip out to the moon to scrounge up raw materials to assemble probes that would be landed in various places to make reception more reliable. Given the obvious risks, I deferred the idea of reassembling my "real" body. At this point there was no need for "me" to be "me". With the ability to dynamically generate "clothing" from the nanotechnic devices it was built from, my avatar was ready to "be" me.
So, with this "face", I was ready to try facing individual humans on the Earth. Of course I wasn't quite right. A Mars-born human tends to differ in appearance from a born "earther", especially in musculature.
Avatars are flexible and can handle vacuum almost as well as a Ship can, so it was nothing to halt and hover near the east coast of North America and lower my avatar via gravitic tractors; once in the upper atmosphere I coupled my primary attention to the avatar as it fell through the air, remaining in free-fall in order to get close enough to the ground to use gravitics to bring it to a stop.
Where I'd land... well, I'd originally aimed for a place in the eastern portion of what was referred to as the United States. It was fortunate that I chose night time for this drop; my avatar was well-equipped with a sensory capacity much greater than a normal human's.
With an unexpected splash I arrived in the middle of a river.
Water. When I'd been fully human I'd never seen so much water while growing up on Mars. Only as a Ship (and with avatars) had I been this close to so much.
It was easy enough to walk out of the water onto shore, the water being easily shed by the "skin" and "clothing".
There is something to arrogance and stupidity that we humans all fall prey to, and only the uncertainties of life make it possible to wiggle our way out of disaster.
It was locally around 9PM when I walked through someone's campground.
How was I to know? I was an innocent. Nothing I saw seemed to be familiar. I recognized the boxy metal object with wheels as a vehicle but I'd never seen a real fire before. I was so entranced by the flames that I didn't recognize the group of people gathered around it until a large male stood up and blocked my path.
Aside from the fact that he was dressed very differently from myself (well, my avatar) finding him grabbing my shirt and lifting me off the ground was, well, uncomfortable.
Mind you, not a matter of physical comfort, more emotional.
That an avatar weighs rather more than the flesh and blood it's faking must've struck the man as odd. He put me back down, kept a hold on me, and stared at me, looking confused.
Given the way any avatar is designed and assembled, a lot of sensory equipment were focused on this human male; I could detect quite a bit of information and could tell that his performance was impaired.
Widening my scope I was able to ascertain that almost all of the people around the fire were tired. I scanned and studied and saw the differences in clothing and so, as my avatar was held in place, changed the clothing to match the form the male holding we was wearing. This melted my shirt from out of the hand of the big man holding me, who looked over my body again in shock.
"Who... or what... are you?" came the unsteady voice.
I think I was as shocked as he. It had been hundreds of years since I'd needed to hear words carried by air much less spoken myself.
How to identify myself? "Call me Stan, for now. My full designation is Stanley One Zero Three Two Seven Seven Slash Three Two, to be more exact."
He looked over my body more carefully in the firelight. More of my body was exposed given the change in clothing and he looked at my legs and arms pretty closely. "You look pretty scrawny. How can you stand on such thin legs?"
I looked at my avatar's legs and arms and compared them with those around me.
Well, I could see some re-engineering of my image was going to be needed but that would require raw materials. I spoke again, addressing his question "I am not starved but I will need to do some re-engineering. I will need to take some time..."
I stepped away, back to the water and laid down in the shallows and let the avatar's engineering AIs go to work. The water was needed to cool the systems while they worked in breaking down the mud, sand and other organic detritus to add to the body I was driving.
It took ten minutes to bulk "me" up to a more "normal" appearance-- for an earther.
By the time I got back up out of the water I was almost as tall as the large male who'd originally accosted me and my limbs had gotten larger around. Quite a few of the systems management processors were happy with the changes given the extra leverage and motivator mass... and there was more room for this body to carry coolant and to distribute it.
As I stood again I re-configured the "clothing" to properly cover the body, attempting to match the appearance of those around me.
People are weird. I was surrounded by these people who were looking at me with odd expressions on their faces.
One female, larger than the others, walked up to me and stroked the bald scalp and asked me "No hair?"
At least, something I knew. "Hair is usually inhibited due to it's inefficiencies within a closed environment. Early on it was hard to recycle hair without expending a lot of energy on the job."
I got a lot of nods.
The original giant stuck out his hand to me "I'm Eddie." He then pointed to the woman who asked about my lack of hair and said "This is my wife Debbie." Of the other four smaller humans "My twins Tammy and Tommy, Glenn and little Holly." He turned and looked more closely at me "All right, so what are you?"
I shrugged and told the truth: "What you see is merely an avatar, a 'face', if you will. I'm a Ship, you see. I fly from star to star, carrying information, goods and passengers. When I need to interact with those still fully corporeal I construct an avatar, a... ummm... robot? Well, this" my hand waved at the body "isn't really me since my real body and brain are" and I pointed directly at where the ship was, above us "approximately two hundred twenty seven point three two three kilometres that way."
Tammy looked at me closely before asking me "Are you man or machine?"
"Man, at least up there. This" waving at the avatar's body, "is a machine. I was born human, then, by the time I was an adult, I merged into a Ship."
Tommy asked "So, how long have you been a Ship? And what does it take to be one?"
"I have been a Ship for approximately eleven thousand eight hundred twelve earth years. I'm here -- and now -- because I accidentally made a jump into the past. When that happens we can't go back."
Glenn looked at me and asked "Why are you telling us this? Captain Kirk wouldn't tell anybody anything because of the Prime Directive."
Huh? "Who's Captain Kirk? And what is this 'prime directive'?" The name sounded familiar and some checks with the AIs managing radio data collection had not forwarded fictional traffic to me.
Glenn, Tommy and even Tammy gave me a lecture on a TV show named Star Trek. I had the AIs try to give me a summary as well but the human minds around me did a better job.
I finally nodded and explained "It doesn't apply; we already know there are multiple versions of the Universe. Anything I do here won't affect my time line. As it is, in my histories, Neil Armstrong didn't blow his lines and the crew of Apollo 13 didn't make it back alive. A lot of things in space have changed because they survived the disaster, things that I suspect under-cut the Moon Colonization efforts in 1989 and the first Mars Landing in 1992. At the rate things are going in this time-line I doubt the human race will survive the nanowar of 2087."
This got silence around the campfire until little Holly walked up to me, gave me a hug, then sat on my lap. "Unka Stan, please tell me a story..."
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Ship Too Sure Part: 0 Universe: Ships Summary: Man as Machine Keywords: scfi, nosex, slow Revision: $Revision: 1.5 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: ShipTooSure.x,v 1.5 2005/11/20 15:22:49 jcl Exp $