by Mark Alan Barner (a.k.a., Keklas Rekobah)
2016-12-08
Look ... you're asking me to explain something that even I don't understand, and I invented it!
Well, not 'invented' per se ... more like 'discovered' ... accidentally ... while looking for something else.
(Okay, so I metaphorically tripped over it in the metaphorical darkness while metaphorically dancing a metaphorical tango with a metaphorical giant scorpion, okay? Don't ask me to explain. Just go with it.)
Anyway, what I came up with was a variation of the Alcubierre Drive that actually works. Yeah, I know ... "Lonely scientist makes great discovery after decades of isolation", but that's not really how it happened.
It started back in the third grade, when I read my first science-fiction book. Since I was already reading at the tenth-grade level, the librarians let me check out books from the Young Adult section. "Rocket to Limbo" by Alan E. Nourse. It had everything -- FTL spaceships, anti-gravity, soldiers in spacesuits, mental powers, treachery, mutiny, betrayal, mystery -- and it set my imagination on fire. From that point on, only maths, science, and science-fiction were of any interest to me.
I became the quintessential science geek. Chemistry sets, telescopes, microscopes, and all kinds of electronic gadgets were my toys when all the other kids were shooting hoops, running for home, scoring touchdowns, and dating girls.
(Now, don't get me wrong; I like women -- still do -- but we rarely get along. Seems that their ideas about 'romance' and 'relationships' don't bear up under the close scrutiny of an analytical mind. Enough said, okay?)
Anyway, my Science Fair projects always got the blue ribbon, and the grants and scholarships led me to my Master's Degrees (Magna Cum Laude only ... lost out to a dual PoliSci and Econ major ...), and most of my post-grad employers were supportive of my side projects.
But it wasn't until the DOE took me on that my research really got some traction. Remember all of the excitement about controlled fusion? Well, that was me. Of course, the DOE holds the patents; but I got a nice pension, my own lab, and a keen research staff out of it, as well. What they don't tell you is that I had to also invent a means to compress the deuterium/tritium pellets enough to fuse them together.
We tried everything -- lasers, electrostatic discharges, neutron bombardments, accelerated particle collisions -- you name it. Then one night, after everyone else had gone home, I tried a variation on the Casimir effect, and "CRACK!" -- sustained hydrogen fusion!
When I ran the calculations, the result made no sense. So I ran them again and again under different models until, suddenly, the answer lept out at me.
Not only had I invented a means to sustain a hydrogen fusion reaction, but I had invented a means to create artificial gravity. Two inventions in one night. Only later was I to learn that only one of them could be made public.
('Invented' ... 'discovered' ... whatever. I'm the one with the Nobel Prize for Physics. Okay?)
Anyway, when the staff came in, they found me cross-legged on the floor, staring at the reactor as if it were a Christmas tree. They were shouting and dancing and carrying on like we had just won a war. But within an hour, it looked like a new one had just started.
Someone had called our Chief Administrator. She had called our DOE liaison. He had called his people in Washington. Next thing we knew, the building was in lock-down, and we were all herded into the cafeteria. We could see a bunch of Marines in full combat gear outside, digging in and putting up razor wire.
Then the interrogations started.
They asked me about my family, my relatives, and any "sexual liaisons" I may have had and when I'd had them. They photographed me, fingerprinted me, took blood and DNA samples, took x-rays, and left no part of me untouched. They asked me over and over again about the work I was doing, how I felt about the government, if and when I had ever travelled overseas, and the names and addresses of every foreign national I had ever known.
("All part of the process", they said.)
I spent three days inside that building, being 'politely questioned' by people who seemed to have no real idea of what I had accomplished, each one seeming to imply or openly insist that I had stolen critical data from someone else. Eventually, one of my old professors showed up and ordered everyone to "stand down" and put the place back the way it was.
(Who knew? She had always struck me as the shy, bookish type. Now here she was barking orders and watching those Marines literally jump to carry them out!)
"I always knew you had the potential", she told me. "All we had to do was give you sufficient resources and wait. Congratulations on a job well done."
She explained that ours was one of twenty DOE facilities doing the same kind of research, and that ours was the only one to show any real progress. She also told me that most of the staff was sent home within a few hours, and that most of the rest went home before midnight. The remainder went away 'somewhere' and I never heard from them again.
("Their whereabouts are classified above your security clearance, citizen" was all she'd tell me. Each time she's looking more and more like a snake just before it strikes. Scary.)
Anyway ...
(Yeah, I know. I say that a lot. Learn to deal with it. Okay?)
... I finally got to go home, shower, sleep, eat a decent meal, and catch up on the news. Seems that the DOE was pitching the event as "A revolutionary scientific breakthrough in nuclear fusion" all over the TV and the Net. They were also promising an official announcement 'soon' and an interview with the genius at the heart of it.
You know the rest. Me, in jeans, sandals, and a polo shirt, shaking hands with the President, and then me falling asleep during his speech, followed by my 30 seconds of stuttering and stammering. Then a barrage of rapid-fire questions from the Press, most of which I answered with "Huh?". A later interview with just one journalist and a more relaxed and coherent me. Hourly updates on my whereabouts, my actions, and my every word.
("Fusion Scientist Flosses in Five-Star Restaurant!", "Birkenstocks? This Scientist Says, 'No Way!", "Auto Unions Upset Over Scientist's Volvo!", and so forth.)
A few years later, the DOE was converting fossil-fuel electrical plants to hydrogen fusion near every major metropolitan center. Megawatts of energy were coming out of a few micrograms of hydrogen every day. The skies were clearer and electricity was cheaper, mostly due to a resurgence in interest for all-electric ground transportation.
(Oh, yeah ... I won a Nobel Prize for Physics. Did I mention that already? Too bad that all of the global fame and recognition inspired crackpots and Luddites to send me death threats, and for foreign governments to try to steal the 'secret' of cheap, reliable, fusion-based electricity. I had to relocate to a military base and give up some of my civil liberties to survive.)
But you wanted me to explain the Stardrive. Bear with me.
A couple more years went by, and I found myself as the Chief of Research at a joint DOD/DOE laboratory on the west coast, trying to adapt the new technology to work on ocean-going ships and in ground vehicles. Our reactors had already replaced the fission reactors on our aircraft carriers, but we were having more and more trouble getting the reaction to start and sustain itself as the reactors got smaller and smaller. It seems that reactor volume plays an important role.
(Remember that old 2D movie with the small fusion reactor mounted on the trunk of a car? That's what we were aiming for.)
So we went back to basics -- lasers, electrostatic discharges, neutron bombardments, accelerated particle collisions, et cetera. It wasn't until we tried a combination of all of these that we started making progress. Then it occurred to me that maybe the reaction was extinguishing itself because the helium wasn't being extracted fast enough, what with helium having a higher fusion 'flash point' than hydrogen.
Our previous reactors were all spherical, with the helium being drawn off from the top. We needed a more linear reactor, where hydrogen goes in one end and helium comes out the other. We also needed a micro-gravity environment.
I proposed a new design, to be constructed in orbit. My calculation implied that a micro-gravity environment might improve our chances of success. They also implied that it was just as likely that the entire experiment would "go nova" and vaporize itself, along with a LOT of the surrounding real estate, so space was the place to go ...
A few more years, and we had our orbital facility, complete with an observation room looking over the laboratory floor through a 5-centimeter thick bulletproof window.
Preliminary tests showed promise, but we still couldn't get past a certain minimum volume, no matter what we tried. Still, it wasn't a total loss -- the facility was largely self-sustaining, and it incorporated lab space for research in the fields of astronomy, biology, and medicine, as well as physics.
Then I re-read an early paper on the Alcubierre Drive -- a purely speculative concept that was based on an obscure solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity. No one had ever got it to work, and it had remained on the fringes of legitimate science ever since.
(It requires the existence of "exotic matter" -- also called "Unobtainium", for obvious reasons.)
But it got me thinking that maybe we were going about our problem all wrong. Our initial design was spherical, with artificial gravity generators compressing the hydrogen at the center of the reactor. The second design was linear, with hydrogen coming in through one end, helium leaving through the other, and with a superconducting solenoid wound around the reactor in such a way that the axis of the magnetic field was coincident with the axis of the linear reaction chamber.
Our third design incorporated a modulated, multiphasic magnetic field with its axis perpendicular to the axis of the reactor vessel. The field was modulated so that it would 'rotate' around the reactor without the solenoids moving at all.
(No, really!)
Anyway, our first run was a success. We were able to reduce the size of the reactor to one-tenth of the first prototype's volume. But we ran into that helium throughput problem again, so we installed a second set of solenoids downstream of the first and phased them such that they would not interfere with each other. We sync'ed up the gravity generators, as well.
Computer simulations showed that it could work. As we ramped up power to the ignition point, we began to notice a sympathetic vibration developing throughout the facility. This seemed normal, considering the amount of energy going into the solenoids and the gravity generators. All systems showed green, so I hit the 'Ignition' button.
Everything went dark. I was thrown against a bulkhead. I saw stars. They wouldn't go away. Then I saw the moon slowly creeping across the observation window and realized that the lab was gone.
In fact, that end of the facility was completely missing.
Damage control parties showed up, and someone took me down to Medical. They stitched me up, shot me full of painkillers, and sent me out to make room for more injured and wounded.
(No casualties, Thank God!)
We got emergency power on-line, and communications were restored. Reports came in from other stations, both in orbit and on the ground. They said that a bright flash was seen at the moment of ignition, originating from where the lab used to be. Almost immediately, another bright flash was seen near the Moon's surface, and just before a minor 'moonquake' was recorded.
The military showed up three days later, but not before we had received images of what remained of the object that had crashed into the Moon. It was our facility's lab section. I recognized what was left of the reactor and its attached equipment.
Those images took about a second to reach us from the lunar surface -- more than the amount of time between the disappearance of our lab section and its impact on the Moon. The lab section had travelled faster than the speed of light to reach the Moon. We had 'invented' a working FTL drive -- the Stardrive.
(No, I did not want to name it after myself. I'd already had more than my fill of "fame and glory". Now I just wanted to build another Stardrive and actually go somewhere with it ... and come back alive, of course.)
By that time, who should arrive on the military transport but my old professor. She 'requested' all of the data we had on our last experiment, including any copies and voice records. After she reviewed it, she sat me down in the observation room and asked me what had happened. She listened attentively to even the most technical explanations. When I was done, she leaned back and quietly gazed out of the window. Nothing could be heard for a long time except our breathing and the whir of the ventilators.
"Do you know what this means?", she asked.
"I think so."
"Tell me."
"The military has a new weapon."
"No ... maybe ... something else."
"The Stardrive."
She only nodded. We were both silent for a while, letting it sink in.
"What were your solenoids made of?"
"An iridium-based superconductor. Why?"
"Have you ever heard of Chicxulub?"
"Vaguely ..."
"About 66 million years ago, something hit the Earth in the Gulf of Mexico near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, forming the Chicxulub Crater. The event wiped out three-quarters of all animal and plant life on Earth. It also deposited a thin layer of iridium all over the world."
"An asteroid?"
"Or an object equipped with a Stardive ... one like yours."
"I had nothing to do with Chicxulub."
"Still a snarker, I see." She smiled and shook her head. "'They' may still be out there ... or a remnant of their civilization. This alone is enough motivation to get your Stardive into production and to go out there to look for them. Our first stop is Barnard's Star."
Anyway ... that's how our Inter-Stellar Exploration Initiative got started.
We still don't understand exactly how the Stardrive works. We only know that when certain pieces are put together and energized in a certain way, they and the object they are attached to will disappear from causal space and reappear someplace else in less time than it would take for a beam of light to travel the same distance -- that's all. This seems to violate not only causality, but a few other physical principles that we used to think were inviolable.
We also know that the distance travelled is closely related to a math function that takes into account the energy put into the Stardive, the universal gravitational constant, the total mass being moved, the volume of the object being moved, and a few other "fudge factors" that try to take into account any incidental gravitational fields between the point of origin and the destination.
Further, when the object is moving, it is completely cut off from causal space. That is, it seems to be in its own little universe, all by itself, where you can't see where you're going, and where shipboard time passes differently from time in causal space. The relationship between the two time frames is complex -- again, related to mass, volume, distance travelled, energy, and the universal gravitational constant. For short distances -- about 70.7% of a light-week or less -- shipboard time is theoretically as instantaneous as you can get. As the distance increases, shipboard time also increases, approaching a theoretical 1.58 seconds per hundred parsecs, but never actually taking that long.
Unless something goes wrong, of course ... like ploughing into the center of a star along the way ...
So what you do is point the ship toward where you want to go, calculate the amount of energy you need to get there, dump that much energy into the Stardive, and hope that you are not too far off for your inertial drive to "fine tune" the remaining distance.
That's all I can tell you. We're still trying to figure out why it works. All we know is that it does work, and that is all that matters, anyway ... okay?
• • •
Author's Note: As you can see from the title block, I started this story about 6 years ago, under my real name, and have been 'tweaking' it ever since. I originally intended it as a filler for the backstory of a popular role-playing game, but now feel that it is more appropriate here; possibly as a way to explain how the Terrans stumbled upon their own version of a fusion-powered hyperdrive in the WoS universe. I hope you have enjoyed it.
KR/MB
