Arkborn

Part I

Recruits

I

Recruits

What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him?

and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?

~ Job 7:17 ~

The co-ordinates, and then the speck, gradually become the Ark. It is a cylinder, already bristling with stubby spokes, like the hub of a bicycle wheel. Youssef has a lock on the port and is flying, merging his velocity vector with the approach path. It is his first high-orbit docking.

It is also the Ark’s – if you can call this assemblage of bits and pieces by its ambitious name – the Ark’s first docking in high orbit. If Youssef could inspect it carefully, it wouldn’t look much different from what he saw as he last docked with it in low orbit seven months ago. But he knows that since that day this pile of junk has moved, using the first and second burns of its main engine. That last docking was about 100 miles above the surface of the Earth. This one looks exactly the same – same piece of junk – but it is about 22,000 miles above the Earth. If you can call 22,000 miles away above anything.

Youssef remembers the stories some of his teachers told about young men going into battle in Spitfires and Hurricanes in World War II. They had minimal training. He feels like that now. He is using the Magic Carpet software, maneuvering toward a port on one end of the axis of this Ark that is to be. The software computes the orbital mechanics, translating the relative accelerations he wants into what will achieve the same in this high orbit. So far so good. The speck, the assemblage of junk, now the big bicycle wheel hub, is aligned with the symbol on his Heads Up Display. Youssef has to get the two vehicles’ relative velocity to zero on schedule. He is flying by hand because he is good at it and wants to get better. Thirty seconds to Decision Point. He has to decide now if his trajectory is good enough. Can he continue, or must he abort, translating laterally so that he misses the Ark?

He is close enough now to see the real Port 3, lower right in the pentagon, merging with its symbol on the HUD. Deceleration is on track in the HUD graph. The grapple arm symbology appears in the HUD in his peripheral vision. That’s it. DP. He’s going in. In the cone of vision of the real world out front, the grapple arms – the real ones of the Ark – appear.

Youssef is enjoying himself. His ship’s mechanical probe is dead in the middle of the target on the Ark. He is going for a ZET docking. Zero Energy Transfer. He tweaks the closing velocity slower. He wants this to last. He wants the first contact to be with the grapple arms as they embrace his ship.

Youssef has carried many pieces of the Ark into low-earth orbit. It was his dream to become a low-orbit shuttle pilot. Noah had decided that although the boosters were auto-landing successfully, with about a 95% retrieval rate, that wasn’t good enough for his people. It’s time to put someone’s ass in the seat, he said. Youssef jumped at the chance. In two years he has had forty-seven launches, forty-seven first stage separations, and – praise be to Allah – forty-seven successful landings. Then he was tagged for high orbit. Beyond his dreams. In a blissful haze of high-energy learning for six months plus. Theory. Math. Video games about gravity and curved spacetime. The high-orbit shuttle in mind-numbing detail. The Simulator. Orbital Mechanics becoming his dreams, part of his natural environment. This morning Youssef was confident he could fly today’s mission. Even without the Magic Carpet.

●

It might have been the election that turned Noah. Or not turned, exactly – because as far back as he can remember, Noah has always believed that stewardship of the Earth and learning to live in space are essentially the same problem – operating a closed system.

So what was the turning? It was more a decision to act after a long simmering of possibilities. It was a small step toward recognizing that one man cannot do everything. Although Noah is not yet old, his was an old man’s calculation – what do I do now in order to be most effective in the time remaining?

The electric cars, the batteries – these could be seen as Earth stewardship. Or not. Perhaps the technology is just as useful on the way to Mars? For a few years now Mars had been the ostensible destination. The answer to why are you making rockets, Noah?

The turning was inward and silent, as all great works must be in their tender moment of birth. Tender, vulnerable, and yet violent as a storm. Noah saw that it was not up to him to decide the destination. Mars, up to now, had been an excuse. If indeed it was God speaking to him, Mars was not what He meant. No – God, or whoever, wanted Noah to gather together what he could of Humanity for the simplest of reasons. Survival. It was all of God’s purpose in one word. It was Nature, Evolution, and the History of Mankind. God had done this before, way back in the beginning. He had sworn never to do it again. But God – if She were a large, black and beautiful humanoid – would smile as She thought of Einstein. How large his vision. How curious his faith. How close he came to recognizing Her as She threw the dice.

●

The shuttle is hovering in the target zone, barely translating. With his fingertips, Youssef kills the relative motion. The ship’s mechanical probe hasn’t touched the Ark. The new high-shuttle pilot concentrates hard. If he can keep his ship in the 10cm spherical target for 10 seconds, the secondary docking trigger will fire. The union will be consensual.

●

The original Ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. It had three stories. Since a cubit is the distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his outstretched middle finger, and taking a stab at the size of the man envisioned, that works out to about 150 metres long, 25 metres wide, and 15 metres high. Big, but perhaps not big enough for the new job.

Noah wants more than two of everything. Two is not enough for survival. He wants all varieties of human being. We don’t have time for evolution, he says. He wants the sum and the history of man’s knowledge. He wants curators. He wants trees and birds and bees. He wants light and air and beauty.

Noah is thinking more like a kilometre in diameter – even for the first Ark. The Ark is a flying saucer, but it will not fly in an atmosphere. Noah is aiming for that, but there are a few problems to be solved. How to use energy directly to navigate space-time, for example. He can be colourful in meetings, pushing a new idea toward derision. It’s still propulsion. Throwing mass out the ass. Newton’s Third. Hey – mass is precious. Remember Einstein? We don’t throw shit away.

The Ark is a big wheel. It will rotate around its axis to make G. Its axis will rotate to make day and night. Naturalists are still working on thousands of details. How will phototropic trees and plants adapt?

●

It looks like one of those driverless cars. Behind it, at the light, tall thin Youssef suppresses a giggle. Ameerah is short. The light is one of those no-right-on-red outliers on the South Shore. The light turns green. Youssef can see a hand rise and tug the steering wheel for the turn. A pretty hand. Magically, the driverless car accelerates around the turn, as if a short leg has stabbed the gas pedal. But it rolls demurely down Boulevard Roland-Therrien toward Plant 1. The limit is 50kmh and there are speed cameras.

Behind her, Youssef is still trying to find her head. He can see the steering wheel and the back of the front seat. He has just met her – at the flying club at Plant 5. So far he knows they are both engineers. They are both contractors for Universal. She wants to be a pilot. They are going to see Lieutenant Sebastien at Badge Control. The driverless car seems to know the way. Trailing it at 50kmh, with cars passing them on the left, Youssef is as alert – as excited – as he was on his first solo.

●

Democracy was failing, and much of the trouble originated in the Net. Noah has been worrying at this for some time, but in the year after the election he began to act on the plans forming in his head. He bought a few Silicon Valley startups and trolled Human Resources, waiting for a strike. The vain, those interested in money and power – these he threw back. He was patient. Sooner or later he would find what he needed – young people who thought idealistically about the Net, the way its founders had a generation before. As his hooks gathered them in, he put them to work in new divisions of his companies, making tools. Tools for making the New Net.

The quality Noah looks for is seriousness. Not a person who never laughs, but someone who is serious about her work. Someone who has a thirst for new knowledge. Someone who can be questioning and critical about what he already knows. These people are not the majority, but they are out there. Or rather, they are in here, in the companies Noah owns. When he comes across such a person he promotes her into a more challenging position and tracks her progress. These are his protégés. He has not met them, of course. But he knows that he will, when the time is right.

Noah has a knack for new ventures. But his success – why God looks upon him with favour – is that each of his ventures has a purpose larger than itself. When he is asked about another company – one of those beholden to the Harvard Business School model – he hesitates with one of his wan smiles. Then he deftly changes the subject. Maximizing return on investment for stakeholders is not his concern. His ventures are like his people. They are focussed on something larger, something beyond. They are stepping stones. Sure – he does step away from some, even though they are furthering societal goals, because he is one man and he needs his sleep. And yes – his ventures are at least partly aimed at capital formation. But already in his third or fourth venture he is flying space vehicles and talking about going to Mars. He doesn’t hide his ambition.

●

At twenty-six, Sebastien was already Lieutenant Sebastien, head of Badge Control for Sécuritaire. A few years previously, Universal Technologies had spun off its security division to the contractor. Everything was being spun off. It was the Wall Street fashion of the day. Even in the core division, accountants began to outnumber engineers. If I had to start a clean-sheet engine today, said a senior team leader, I wouldn’t have the people. Even so, after the purges and the carrot-on-a-stick retirements, the new engineer recruits were a good and diverse bunch. Ameerah, Gopinath, Naveed, Niloofar. Cheerful. Young. Smart as hell. And Sebastien. He never saw the job as meaningless bureaucratic paper-pushing. He saw it as a necessary control on thousands of employees and contractors as they came and went through Universal’s plants and research facilities. Universal Technologies has a reputation for building and maintaining reliable engines. Part of Sebastien’s responsibility was maintaining that reputation. He had the weight of generations on his shoulders. Like an increasing number of young Québecois(es), he made himself fluently bilingual. But above all he was cheerful and positive. He stood out because he had none of the grudging, policing aspect of the typical fonctionnaire. At twenty-seven, he made a leap untypical of the era. He jumped back to Universal, the spinner-off company.

●

In the second year after the election Noah’s car company scaled up, and with it grew his ability to wield capital. He worried quietly at the Canadian deal for a year, negotiating with two governments and one company – Trombone Aerospace. He wound up with control of the company and operational control of the huge and half-abandoned Mirabel Airport.

One advantage of the Canadian deal was people poaching. Trombone had a lot of young engineers, and there too most of them were immigrants, from just about everywhere. Noah likes diversity. That’s our strength as humanity, he says. No two of us are the same. How else are we going to add to our collective knowledge?

In that same year there were rumblings that Air Traffic Control would be privatized. Noah had been waiting for it. A failing state will always sell to the Market, he said. So will a failing business, if there’s a way to spin it.

He set up a group to prepare. We want to jump on it if it happens.

It came in year three after the election, when the next campaign was in furious motion. Sell ATC was one of the desperate promises, and yet in the eye of the media it was under the radar. Noah’s companies snapped up eleven of the twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

When Noah bought Universal Technologies, Sebastien was one of those swept up, and he was high among those whose trajectories had been flagged. Noah was far enough along in his plans by that point that he saw a need. Immigration was over. His people would be travelling freely on company aircraft through company-controlled skies. Records would have to be kept.

●

Like many others, Naveed has a history that includes both Trombone and Universal. At Trombone he was involved with composites. The new airplane used more of them than previous large aircraft. The new airplane also had a new engine. A geared engine. Perhaps not the first, but the first of that size. As an amateur musician, Naveed became fascinated with the idea of a geared turbofan. With the potentially destructive forces that could arise between those linked, whirling masses. With harmonics, resonance, phase relationships. It was not enough to just connect those masses together and hope for the best. The future of the new engine, and of the new airplane, depended on figuring this stuff out. He left Trombone for an opportunity at Universal. Figuring out the dynamics of these whirling masses. And on the weekend he read textbooks on Orbital Mechanics.

●

With the earnestness of the very young, Ferdinand tells his student about seeing a friend die in a glider. The friend misjudged the turn to final and crossed the controls. He spun in from 500 feet. Ferdinand and his friend were seventeen.

Someone else in the ground-school class has already spun, and Ameerah’s competitive side has taken control. She wants to spin for the thrill. For the bragging rights. The now-nineteen instructor has learned the hard way about survival. He has to pass on what he can.

●

Now in year three the New Net is up, albeit in test mode. One of Noah’s Silicon Valley startups already has servers connected via satellite to the Nevada and Southern California campuses. These links and prototype satellite-only smart-phones use the new protocol – Spread Spectrum Sequencing. Despite the high latency bouncing up to geosynchronous orbit, the protocol is solid. Noah is almost ready to switch over.

And the Human Knowledge Archive Project has been in high gear for a couple of years, using bots to troll the Old Net, stealing whatever they can and stripping away malware, even storing the latter in offline lockups for future reference. It is not that Noah wants to steal contemporaneous proprietary secrets. He is far enough ahead without having to resort to what he considers cheating. But the projects working away at digitizing Humanity’s history – those are fair game. Considering book-burning throughout history, the Dark Ages, and the destruction of the great library of Alexandria, it is prudent to make sure some of our remaining knowledge survives. Indeed, this digital history is travelling between campuses, backing itself up, and testing the SSS protocol. SSS was designed to handle the 250ms-plus latency. It was also designed to have a very wide bandwidth. The test speeds are close to the design speed. The exchange of sequencing keys, however, is still a work in progress. The engineers have been using one of the frequencies to exchange handshakes with more traditional enciphering. Not good enough, said Noah. Find a way to do all the communication on the spread spectrum.

●

Ferdinand is the issue of an improbable romance – proud Portuguese mulher falls for radical Québecois separatist. When Papa was a boy, power oozed away from English merchants and the Catholic Church and lodged in a new secular civil service. For a change of that magnitude, very little blood was shed. The time became known as La Révolution Tranquille. Families of fourteen or more children gave way to families of one or two. Papa’s generation still half-believed, but at least outwardly they pushed hard against all the teachings of the Church. They no longer married. They came together with hyphenated names in a civil union and produced one point seven young. They urged the unilingualism of the farms into the city. English power brokers moved to Toronto and used The Market to take separatists hostage. By the time Ferdinand Portance-Magellan came along, Trombone and Universal were paying their engineers half what they could earn in English in Toronto.

Ferdinand’s world ended thirty minutes west of Montreal, where the Trans-Canada Highway, hitherto the Autoroute Vingt, becomes the Four-Oh-One. Somehow Papa had extracted a promise that no Portuguese would be spoken at home. Unlike his easygoing Italian friends, Ferdinand has no mother tongue.

●

Naveed was tapped in the late autumn of year three. I’d like you to help with our space projects, said Noah. From whirling masses to celestial whirling masses. Naveed was ready. He moved to the Southern California campus, but not to work on rockets. He pitched Noah the tether idea. As a generator. As propulsion. Maybe even draining some energy from the Van Allen Belts in the process. Noah listened and said just tell me what you need. And whom.

●

Aviation in Canada is a small world. Still, Youssef can’t believe his luck. Is this your first trip on the Global, he asks. Where’s the eye-height target, she says. Ameerah has run the seat adjustment up to the top and is looking around. Finally, satisfied she can see out, she nods. Yes. Know who’s on board? Remember Lieutenant Sebastien? He’s going to meet the boss. Yeah. He’s our customs, our immigration, our badge control. Who knows what he’s going to be doing for the boss.

Their destination today, out of St. Hubert, is the battery plant in Nevada. The route is not quite Minimum Time Track. They have to go through Chicago Center. The boss doesn’t own Indianapolis Center.

They have been dating for a while, but Youssef doesn’t know where he stands. He still has to push through fear when he dials her number. But he wants to be with her. Now, on the flight deck, his pulse is already abnormal. And he still doesn’t know the whole story about who is important in her life.

They run the numbers for the flight. It is an easy stretch for the Global, the latest version of Trombone’s long-range executive jet. It will leap into the air off this 7000-foot runway with Flex Thrust and climb to Flight Level 440 with a shrug. In five hours and eight minutes they will be touching down in the Nevada desert. It is a layover. They don’t yet know the plan for tomorrow.

●

Another rapid, bloodless change is happening. This time it is aviation’s sine wave shooting upwards into positive territory at maximum slope. Pilots are in demand. Ferdinand jumps at the chance to fly a sophisticated twin-engine airplane for $500 a day plus expenses. The rub is that the captain is a crusty 80-year-old who speaks very little French.

You don’t want to work for BestJet? Why not?

They don’t hire Francophones.

That’s total bullshit. Who told you that?

My friend at Unlisted Air.

I guess he didn’t tell you that BestJet’s Chief Pilot is French. He graduated from the CEGEP de Chicoutimi.

No!

OK, then. Research it yourself. I’ll give you his name. Why do you think your so-called friend told you that? No? To keep you stuck in Quebec. So he could pay you half. Or less.

●

Perhaps it was relief. The letdown after a successful flight. Emerging from intense concentration into its result. Or perhaps it was the result itself.

A young pilot like Youssef takes low orbit in stride. By virtue of his velocity, he is temporarily parked above most of the atmosphere. Soon he will slow down and go down, just as he used to from the stratosphere in the Global: pull the engines to idle. Glide at 300 knots. At 12,000 feet, reduce the rate of descent and slow to 250 knots. Glide. Maneuver. Deploy high-lift devices and slow some more, down onto the back side of the power curve. Bring in some thrust to catch and stabilize the speed. Flare. Land.

It is the same, more or less, from low orbit. Only there is a lot more speed to kill. Fire retro rockets to to initiate the deceleration, and then let atmospheric drag convert your energy to heat. Just not too much heat in the wrong places. Arrive back in the stratosphere and then fly more or less as above.

But here the result of this flight is something new. High orbit. The sky is black. The Earth – dear Mother Earth – is no longer a comforting floor, something you are over the middle of. She is – out there. Over there. You can point at her. She is a nerf ball, even a soccer ball. The blue wrapped around her is tiny, fragile, and more vulnerable than you can imagine.

Looking out the port in the transfer room, Youssef breaks down and sobs.

●

Don’t worry about it, man, says Art. Happens to everyone. This is serious shit. Bigger’n love, if you can imagine. Did you dream? Maybe about someone special? Yeah. Me, too.

Hey – congratulations! There hasn’t been a ZET docking like yours. You’re it, baby. That was a work of art. One thing for sure – it got Noah’s attention. Yeah, he’s here. You’ll meet him. But first you gotta get your G-legs. Takes a day or two.

No, man. It’s not like low orbit. It’s not a quick turn, sleep at home. You’re already a citizen of the Ark. Even if you don’t stay.

●

The battery campus sprawls on the desert beside the new runway. In the style of the Silicon Valley startups, there is everything you need. Spanish-style enclosed gardens with trees and flowers. Clean and bright accommodation. Restaurants with menus that make you feel at home. There is even a pub with good food and draft beer. Youssef and Ameerah don’t drink. They go for a walk and have supper. Tomorrow is a longer day. An hour’s flight down to Southern California. Then five hours back to Mirabel Airport and the Trombone campus. There are rumours Trombone is changing gear. The market for the new airplane has collapsed. The new focus is a low-orbit shuttle.

●

There is another Global on the ramp. The captain is coming down the steps. He recognizes them. Youssef and Ameerah, who had been speaking English, switch to French in their heads. It is Ferdinand. His French is rapid, excited, run together.

Know what they’re going to do with Mirabel? Spaceport. Can you believe it? Inclined orbit. Forty-five degrees.

Yeah, that’s true, apparently. No more Florida. Too expensive. Boss is building another, near Cancun Airport. For equatorial orbit.

You thinking about applying? Yes – for shuttle pilot. You too, Ameerah, Here – handshake with my