Departure

Aboard the Cornucopia

Today, the good ship High Jinks docked with a fresh load of supernumeries - the fifth. Our ship, even with newly-expanded quarters, is started to feel crowded, her usual complement of twenty or so now increased to one hundred and fifty, which number includes many couples and families. The parents have their hands full: put a toddler in zero gravity, and you've got a cute little giggling missile richocheting all over the ship.

Which leads neatly to the question of what these toddlers and their parents are doing on a fab in the asteroid belt: Project Stella. What we have here is the very first privately owned ship capable of interstellar travel, the Cornucopia (now attached to a star drive recently given its first trials attached to the yacht High Jinks). The primary goals of the project are:

• Exploration - to seek out new habitable worlds, new life-forms; to see the galaxy
• Economic - to harvest the resources of new systems with self-repping (Von Neumann) fabs
• Colonisation - to find new homes, and build freer, more prosperous lives

Our "supernumeries" are explorers, scientists, engineers, adventurers, dreamers; people brave enough or crazy enough to take a chance on a new life around a star that we haven't even found yet, making a living with tools we haven't built yet.

Now, we are in the final minutes of preparing for departure, freeing our ship of its camouflage - and what camouflage! We've spend the last few months hidden inside a massive cavern cut into an asteroid, using the bulk of the rock around us to soak up the emissions that would have led the IPTO straight to our door. At last, the stars are moving past our 'ports again as we glide back into open space. 40 minutes or so to get well clear; and then we'll be safely among the stars, even our vast bulk lost in the immensity of this great galaxy, moving further in an hour than light can in years.

Test-drive

The core of it is everything you would hope: suffused in a soft blue glow, it sits behind layer upon layer of shielding (magnetic, radiation, thermal), strung with thousands of cables that add a vaguely organic look, as if a great mass of snakes with plastic skins writhed their way in to bask in the weird light. The thickness of the black buckytube-based support struts hint at the immense forces that that will be developed, and here and there the trained eye can spot the glint of lasers, each beam monitoring the most minute deformation of the structure. Precision with a captial P. The drive is big, too, although without familiar shapes to clue your brain in the scale, the size is hard to grasp. Even now - at rest - it radiates power.

"Artistic" impressions aside, my more immediate concern is, does it work? The components themselves are sound; we've bench-tested the heck out of everything, and all is "nominal". What of the system? Well, we will soon find out; what I am looking at, and describing to you, is a real-live honest-to-goodness star drive! You might be wondering where we got the plans for this little baby... isn't the tech behind star-drives an above-top-secret mystery known only unto the EUFOR and SEAU boffins and deployed only on military-operated "flag-runs"?

JD's position on this, as explained to me just after I joined Project Stella, is that seeking out new worlds and new knowledge is so fundamental to just being human that keeping such a miraculous tech secret is downright criminal. Through means that have not been explained to me, JD "liberated" an incredible motherlode of blue prints, design docs... everything, in fact, that we needed to build our own; now, we are only hours away from doing the first full "system" test. If this thing does work, the ramifications are pretty incredible - because if we can build this thing, so can all the other fabbers (docs have all been P2P'd between the fabs), and the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and we've blasted our way through the roadblock on humanitie's way to the stars.

We've piggy-backed the star-drive to the yacht High Jinks, rather ruining her lines. Her auto-pilot has been fed the coordinates for the test run (this is strictly an un-manned run), and we've instrumented the heck out of everything even slightly instrumentable. Now, it is time to push the Big Red Button (it is actually big and red - a "Wizard special") and find out whether this thing actually works. I figure we are either about to make history as the first non-state actor with interstellar capability, or get vaporised trying. Actually, if I understand the physics correctly, merely being vaporised is one of the less dramatic possible outcomes.

I think I might just re-run a bench-test or two...

Contemplating the Infinite

The days are blurring together; we're working silly hours on our ship, except that there isn't anything saner than being finished and gone as soon as possible.

Last "night", I needed to clear my head; left my workstation and floated down the corridor to a quiet corner, where the lighting is low, and a huge view port is set into the side of the ship - an uncharacteristic grace note in this utilitarian leviathan.

Floating there in the semi-darkness appropriate to the lateness of the hour, I felt my mind empty as a I gazed into the void, eyes focused on something far beyond even the bright unchanging shine of distant systems. A focus returned simultaneously to gaze and mind: a bright star with a bluish tinge near the centre of my field of view, appearing close to Procyon. Too bright, in fact, to be a star...

Strangely, I didn't startle when a soft female voice spoke from close behind me:

"Do you miss it?"

"It?"

"Earth. Being outside. The sky."

I thought for a moment.

"Yes; but not enough to go back. I need... a wider horizon. A bigger sky".

A pause, and then a reply, in a sweet alto, with just the right amount of huskiness to send a tingle all the way up and down my spine:

"Me too".

My new job

I started my new job round about a month back, working for a dude called JD (the anonymous guy from the last post). Right now, I'm working out of Ceres, talking to the banks and the repo men, bargain-hunting for my new employer.

What are we looking for? It's no secret now that the 'neumann fabbing model has kicked economies systems-wide into a death-spiral, or that the media howl of "something must be done" is about lead to some seriously drastic (and probably calamitously stupid) action from our dear leaders. Before that happens, my job is to find a self-rep cabable fab cheaply enough to suit our ridiciulously modest budget; with repos and bankruptcies domino-effecting their way through the business sector out here, this might even be possible.

So why do we want it? Haven't we heard the fab model is dead? What about getting shut down when the new anti-'neumann trade barriers clang shut? Well, with the project we have in mind, let's just say that local political issues won't really be an issue for long....

All about the blog

So, there's this thing I've got myself involved in: a small group of like-minded (we hope!) people who think we've got a chance to turn a combination of a few interesting technologies into a really special opportunity.

I got hooked sitting in a passenger lounge at Mars High, watching a news 'caster giving us the latest gory details on the economic meltdown (no news to me, worse luck - the portofolio that was going to pay off my mortgage next year would barely cover my garden furniture today). The guy next to me was looking like the cat that got the cream; I had him pegged as a short seller, but he turned out to be a lot more interesting than that.

Essentially, this dude was betting the entire net worth of himself and several dozen buddies and investors that they, as a tiny private enterprise leveraging the latest and greatest in 'neumann fabbing and their own particular talents, could get into a game traditionally reserved for state actors. Market conditions were apparently ideal, but the plan was missing a few elements - one of which, on the strength of 30 minutes of conversation, my new friend seemed to think was me.

"So, " he said, "want to help steal a star?"

Well, what do you think?