Marla
Marla Lay had been a gifted child. She graduated at age 13, got her master’s degree at 15 and wrote an already groundbreaking piece as her PhD Thesis when she was 20. That was in the year 2089.
But it was not the end of her career. She was not obsessed with going deeper into one field. She wanted to go broader. She wanted to have an explanation for the universe as a whole. And some of her broad skills helped her in other situations as well. She was the one exceptional multi talent of the third millennium, thinking outside the box like her role model and genius of the second millennium, Albert Einstein.
One of her interests was in data science. She was working with AI in terms of training and giving them the right kind of work at the right time. It turned out to be some kind of symbiosis.
Her second side trait was a good portion of realism and an understanding of economy and psychology. So she also was a natural leader and entrepreneur.
The real breakthrough in her main field of work, physics, had happened at age 26. In 2095, she published her paper ‘A Theory of Transspace’, a paper that was supposed to change the world of science and the world itself more radically than the Theory of Relativity and Darwin’s Origin of Species together.
But even that was just the start. Marla was supposed to become more famous than Einstein, not only because of her groundbreaking papers that changed physics. She added her entrepreneurial spirit to her work as a physicist. This instinct led her to the decision to form a think tank to bring her scientific work to the next level and into reality.
In that project, she gathered many other leading scientists and engineers together for some years to develop viable spin offs and ideas from her Transspace theory. The project was called “Enclave”, because she brought everyone in there to collaborate closely and work in a gated and controlled environment. Neither speculations nor premature thoughts went out of that circle.
The results were disruptive to say the least. The team presented a Faster Than Light drive that made humanity ready to conquer the solar system. As a side result, they presented anti gravity technology that also changed the life on earth at once by providing safe and fast transportation and an infinite amount of new and spectacular tools.
But yet another step increased her fame after the Enclave project published their results and that is the fact that she made money out of her discoveries, so much that she became the third richest person in the solar system with her megacorp Zodiac.
At that time there were already four other global players, who were not so global anymore. They made their money in space by mining asteroids, running space station chains and controlled interplanetary transport. All of them were eager to use the new tech, that could bring more people and goods to and from their real estate in a shorter time. But Marla and Zodiac owned many of the patents and had the talent and skills to use them. They were soon involved in all of these profitable businesses.
Even the name was wisely chosen as two of the other corporations were called Sagittarius and Scorpio. Zodiac for them might have sounded like a declaration of war. But at the same time, they needed access to that groundbreaking technology.
Fifty years later, Marla retired from the company’s chair at age 80. The solar system was split between three corporations with more financial power than any state on earth. The Dublin drive, invented by Zodiac, was the dominant spaceship technology. So the company became number two under Marla, so huge that it could buy number three, Sagittarius. Bigger than any terrestrial nation, no authority was there to prevent them from doing so. It was the corporate wild west. But the possibilities to grow didn’t end at the borders of the solar system.
After Marla Lay, Chi Feng became chairman. He came up with the idea to put his claim on other star systems. He was a diplomat and cultivated good relations with the other megacorps. He managed to form a consortium with his competitors. Their project: sending a series discovery drones into the universe.
Already two years later, the first pair of drones launched from the facilities at Zodiac space station. Project Gemini - of course it was named after a zodiac sign and as it was a pair of rockets, the choice was obvious - started to Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. The drones were built to find habitable planets and valuable asteroids autonomously and acted as communication phalanxes for the probes they carried in their bodies.
