Chapter 1
Chapter I: Introductions
As everyone should know, once you can make molecules from energy, the only way to go is forward.
As everyone should know, programming isn’t that hard, and when you can program molecules into any shape, you can make just about anything.
As everyone should know, when technology can make just about anything, with energy as the only ingredient, you should probably make it more efficient.
As everyone should know, when you can make just about anything for about the cost of a ‘dime’, you’re going to start making ‘dollars’.
As everyone should know, when you flood a market with perfect counterfeits, money goes outta fashion real quick.
As everyone may not know, when you can make anything with electricity and a .pad file, those become the new currency and products. To be frank, I’m disappointed.
A lot has happened over the years since the ‘Collapse of Cheddar’ took place--as I like to call it--my grandmaw had already been working for a space scanning start-up in, as she called it, “the clear sky state.” It was just Texas, but that’s beside the point. She had found an undiscovered, little, tiny, itty-bitty baby of a stable wormhole. It was incredible and should’ve been the biggest discovery of the year--decade even! However, people were going a little crazy at the time, building reactors in their backyards off nothing but sunlight and hope.
While what my grandmaw called ‘a total lack of sense’ was happening in the largest cities, she and her son were doing what all the other smart people did, collecting their families and getting the hell outta there. And the only way out? Up.
Many people did what they did, even while the governments of the world tried to stop people. Believe you me, many people probably wish they heeded the governments pleads to, “...not launch a homemade rocket with half-cocked design plans obtained off the energy market from your backyard” in their final moments, or whenever they got caught in any number of deadly things in space.
I suppose, either way, you made it off that wasteland of nuclear ‘oopsies’ and roving gangs. I’m just lucky my grandmaw designed her own rocket, instead of the alternative of, “I swear I’ve got good specs, me and a buddy used to work at NASA before the collapse!”
That always made my mother wonder, “Whatever happened to the ISS, seeing as so many of those rockets exploded?”
Out of about 2 billion people who were able to build rockets, (though records from societal collapses tend to be inaccurate) 44% of those rockets made it off the ground, 38% didn’t run into someone else’s debris, which now circled the planet, 36% didn’t immediately get pulled into a gravity they couldn’t escape from, and 10% didn’t die from cosmic radiation, people set up among the stars.
Many, my family included, stayed as close as they could to the good old home planet, mostly for access to satellite internet. Many forums started about living in space, and the internet stopped working past the asteroid belt, which was where many people set down. These forums varied from, “How to make the most oxygen efficient home” to “10 Steps to Restarting Society.”
They decided on what I think was the smartest idea they could’ve had. My dad had said that solar energy was their safest bet and that they could stay on the opposite side of Earth around the sun, while still in the habitable zone.
My grandmaw gave me her two cents on it before she passed, saying, “I woulda rather set up shop on someplace where you could ‘walk outside’ and plant a small garden without getting’ the worry of skin cancer.”
That probably would’ve taken a year’s worth of energy just to start, but I liked the thought. Anyway, this idea of orbit was pulled off flawlessly, with the decay rate of a donkey’s frozen corpse, which is to say, practically zero.
People, as they tend to do, started forming communities, whether that be online or on-asteroid. Of course, as communities get bigger, they soon need laws. With laws come people to pass laws, and that makes a recipe for government. Now, this wasn’t all bad. Records started being kept, replicators were restricted, and research was started on practically everything. The cold half of this is that people get jealous. Maybe you got a cushy job in government while your friend was put into energy production management (which is just about the most boring thing), and they’d get jealous.
Another example, which is a bit more... terrible, is the part of the population that didn’t get to leave hell on Earth. They still had their technology, and they were, to put it nicely, absolutely enraged that they still have to fight for survival every single day while those, “posh space men” who only have to worry about kilowatts per hour and whether their neighbor liked their .pad pie recipe.
Naturally, my family was watching from afar, along with more than a few neighbors who liked their idea of orbit and having constant sun. My grandmaw made damn well sure that each of them only had solar panels powering their orbiters, and in doing so, also became a sort of community leader.
My grandmaw told me one slow day that, “Every one of our neighbors followed a set of rules, or else.”
Evidently, the ‘or else’ part of that statement was never needed, since, “Every one of ’em was smart folk, and we all shared what we needed. I even had your pap whip us up a private repository of every file we’d ever need, and that’s how our little community started our own research.”
There was never any trouble on those orbiters, and some relationships even started, which is how I tell this tale today, and where I met Winger. That’s a story for another time though, because right now, we’re trying to get to today.
The people of Earth got themselves together under a common goal, wipe that smug grin off the people of the asteroid belt.
My dad tells me they called themselves ‘Kirch’s People’ at that time, based on Kirch’s Comet. “Well, why’d they start with that name?” you may be asking. It was the first comet ever discovered but astronomist Gottfried Kirch in 1680.
In some twist of genetic mutation, luck, and a very charismatic leader, the people of Earth pulled themselves together and made barely functioning rockets. These, however, were barely functioning rockets with weapons, very crude, very atomic weapons.
This part of the story is not one about how Kirch’s People put up a valiant fight and won. It’s about a very large lesson learned by everyone who was still in our solar system. These killers, murderers, would go on to send 25 nuclear payloads from Earth, with 4 of them being pulled onto the moon, another 4 being shot down with spare ships, 1 hitting a ship attempting to escape from the colony, 2 missing by mere kilometers, and 8 being duds once they hit. For those who didn’t do the math, that’s 6 warheads that detonated killing around three hundred thousand souls.
The colony did not have escape pods then because, and I quote from Governor Sanchez, “We are not advanced enough to require escape pods just yet, however, I have had the engineering department draw up plans for them.”
This quote was from a press conference about the first nuclear reactor being built on the asteroid. Almost none escaped the blast radius with ships they used to get there, either because they had not refueled or because of the sheer slowness of rocket fuel.
Many people at the time had a major bias against anything to do with radioactivity, and rightly so. If you ever wanted to check up on Earth, someone with the tag ‘EarlLives’ pointed a network of camera satellites toward the surface, and still, no one saw it coming.
There were, of course, other colonies, and other governments. They were, to put it nicely, both absolutely outraged and shaking in their boots. Many people wanted revenge, and trust me, they’d get it.
When WAAR, the big news station, put out the story that Kirch’s People were gone, lots of people were, rightly so, fixing to toss an asteroid at Earth.
As my grandmaw said about that time, “Everyone thought the only way was war, and some idiots wanted to just give ’em what they gave us. Me your pap had a better idea...”
“The Better Idea” as I like to call it, was a much better fix and did not involve murder. You see my mother was always good at biology, and she was the inventor of The Quik Scan ®, which could quickly read someone’s vitals with just a prick of blood and one of those old finger laser clips. She had been working on a genetic modifier virus that made children smarter when born, by ‘infecting’ the parent and causing any children they had to have more synapses.
She had proposed the idea about a week after to my dad, “You know, if all of those idiots can’t even think up these hair-brained ideas, they won’t be a bother.”
My father responded, “If it makes them dumber, can’t it do the same to us?”
“Well, I’ll think up something. Like an inoculation against it, or a backup cure.”
And just like that, the idea was spread to WAAR, who took a referendum about whether they thought this idea was better than violence.
Yes, there were counterpoints like, “What if the virus evolves past what we can deal with,” and “What if they find a cure?”
And to that, we say, “It can’t,” and “They won’t.”
Now hindsight is always 20/20, but this is what 79% of people said was humane, and those people are still there today, though it only stuck around for a generation.
“The Better Plan” went off with just one hitch, one of their own, Joan Addams, was infected while the virus was in transport. She had refused to get the inoculation until she had seen no one else was hurt by it. She suffered an IQ loss of about 5 points and two weeks of confinement but was otherwise unharmed.
Now after all that history, you must be bored outta your skull, so I’ll skip past how my grandmaw held together a good-sized colony of 65,000 and skip to the fun part of right before lightspeed travel.
