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Turmiol |
| Written by David Monroe | |
| Saturday, 08 December 2007 | |
In the not so distant future, our planet has tuned out the fact that unlike a century ago, our life span has shortened to a fraction from what it used to be. This is because of an infectious virus generated by our own scientists infected most of our population on and off our planet within the first three years of its outbreak. A mutated strain of the flu, when introduced to a human reduces our lifespan to 27 years. It’s almost like watching Despite the ailing population we’ve been pretty good with our technological advancements. We’re green, and because of the shortened lifespan the focus has become on the younger generations even more now than ever. We can’t time travel or go faster than light as some stories from the past would suggest, but we have outposts on or orbiting most of the planets in our solar system, cryogenics and long term space travel are our methods. It was slow, even more now with our shortened lives, but with what we call “generational leapfrogging” we can keep our fore fathers works alive. I guess an introduction is in order, I’m Ted Behnson; I’m one of the lucky .02% of the human race who isn’t infected with the virus. My current home is a satellite station orbiting Europa. We’re one of the very few habitats that are completely free of the disease. I’m alone in respect to relatives; they are all earthers and have been infected most of who I grew up with have since passed. Because of the threat of infection, the defense of this station is dealt out with sometimes little less than moral execution, probably a necessary evil. Technology has given us the ability to detect the virus from a couple dozen kilometers. Most of the inhabitants are extremely rich people who could buy their way to safety, however in my case I was brought here because of my work in quantum mechanics. My work in the past was in perpetual or renewable energy sources. However the thought of a non-infected habitat, and large amounts of cash changed my field considerably. I’m employed by a company called Kryokaughn, which is in to everything from shipping freight, to research. Currently this company is known best for its work in cryogenics, and enabling our species to circumnavigate our solar system, the technology has made them extremely successful. Current projects that I’m evolved with are artificial gravimetric fields, so the huge spinney space stations can live without the large mechanical artificial gravity simulators. The main goal of reducing the size to population ratio in these orbiting space stations, along with the obvious reduction of energy needed to keep such a monstrosity spinning all the time. The other project that I’m forced to work with is something called VTMD or Vector based temporal matter displacement, which is a big name for putting matter through a tear in space with an end result of faster than light travel. Ridiculous as this sounds some of the big wheels up top are hell bent with it, and see it as the answer to humanities problems with the disease. Zachary Kockert is the bazillion air heading that project and is known for his flagrant hurling of cash at any issue that comes into his path. Most of the scientists working for him are there for the hurled cash and not the research; I’m the ladder although I have little faith in this line of work and consider it back burner to the gravimetric research.
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 10 December 2007 ) |
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