The Professor
Emptiness… There is nothing except this, darkness & cold nothingness. That is unless you call phantom particles, coming in & out of existence every square light year for but a brief microsecond something. Where once the universe thrived with glistening stars & mighty black holes has thanks to those beloved laws of thermodynamics turned into an endless uniformity.
But there stands an oasis, a remarkable world. It is the last refuge of those who refused to leave to the unknown multiverse of the most advanced civilization to have emerged during the near eternity of time since that moment of creation.
Its citizens decided to take the form of the original species – humans. Speciefication had occurred over the infinity of time, caused by home worlds with varying gravitational pulls and atmospheres. However, as the era of black holes ended it was decided that the remaining should take one form & it was the only form that was easily agreed upon. For similar reasons an ancient, extinct language called English was resurrected from the dead.
The last remaining world called Europeous contains a massive population of 120 billion human cyborgs or ci-humans. It is surrounded by a sphere which contains its atmosphere & light shines from it unto the world below. It is a city world except for a great forest in the Southern Hemisphere.
Skyscrapers dot the skyline, joined up by walkways.
Lance7154N (Lance for short), a dark haired & pale skinned sixteen oscillation old of slim build awakens as the shutters of his cryonic capsule automatically open at the allotted time to let the artificial light from the biosphere shine through. He moves from side to side in the capsule cursing his luck, his limbs still tired. Nan bots flow through his blood making sure both body & mind are at their maximum efficiency. However, they let him feel tired, even sick to ensure that he conserves precious energy.
His room is austere containing only a plastic chair beside the capsule and a drawer where Lance kept his clothes. No posters are on the wall and the room lacks any personal touch. Instead the wall & two doors are a cold light blue colour.
Grudgingly he takes off his pyjamas & changes into his clothes; the white uniform customary to all inhabitants of this world. However, he still feels naked & light headed. He goes into the bathroom & looking into the mirror, puts on his Exoset, a large metal helmet that covers one of his eyes & plugs into the back of his bald head.
Immediately the holographic array appears before his eyes. His mind opens the “Schedule” folder & sees that he has a history class called “Beginning of Interstellar War & its Consequences in the First Period” starting in ten minutes.
Lance knew that the First Period related to the Stelliferous era , a period when stars still shone. It will be his first time studying such ancient history. He ponders what it would have been like to live in such a backward era, when life still needed nature to survive.
He pondered if he should use his transporter or instead go for a stroll through the walkways. He decided that instantaneous transportation would be too fast today as he detested waiting.
The walkways were quiet with only the occasional passer-by. He laughed quietly to himself, pondering that he was the oddball walker. He loved to look down at the side of the walkways to the floors below. He wondered to himself if they went on forever.
Lance reached his classroom with 34.5678 seconds to spare, his exoset keeping him abreast of every minute detail.
The class was being held in the usual auditorium A7789. It was a large lecture theatre & could hold 600 ci-humans, most of who were now zipping into their seats through transporters.
Lance could see the professor below. Old, ragged with long white dishevelled hair flowing out by the side of his exoset, he must have been over one thousand oscillations old.
Nervously Lance notices that Lucy is in the seat below him. She is tall with blonde hair and good feminine features. Lance has never directly communicated with her but it is her form that he uses for company when he is in the holographic array. He ponders what it would be like to actually touch her rather than merely have visual stimulation. Next oscillation he may discover during “Humanity & Relationships” class.
The class started with a white flash in the exoset. Immediately Lance senses the consciousness of the net. There are billions of voices, a hive in a netherworld. His senses close in on the Professor’s communications.
“You are here now but you shouldn’t be. This Universe should have died naturally a long, long, long time ago. But intelligence & ingenuity has long altered its course. The atoms that we are made of did not come from the moment of creation but rather from transmatterification.
The energy that fuels your exoset comes from cold fusion. We are all an artificial construct.
Even the “gravity” that is keeping our feet on the ground is invented – neuronisation.
But it wasn’t always so. There was a time when atoms from the moment of creation existed, energy was plentiful from stars & what’s called Newtonian Gravity existed.
Imagine what it would have been like to live during this period. You could stand on some planets’ surfaces and not even require a biosphere.
This is what you all know as the Stelliferous era , now I know that most students prefer the Degenerative Period or The Enlightenment but imagine what it would have been like to have to rely on natural occurring processes in the Universe.-“
Lance was entranced by what a wonderful Universe it must have been. To be free from everything having to be so precise, for the Universe to actually provide you with what you needed to survive.
“There was no need for oscillations, energy was abundant.
The Civilization from which we began started in very ancient times in an unknown Solar System in what is known as the Milky Way Galway. Galaxies were very large collections of stars with a massive black hole at their centres. The Milky Way Galaxy was just one among billions. It may be of interest to note that in the Early Stelliforous Period our ancestors would not have known the true extent of the Universe due to their limited technology & the speed of light.
It appears that Space colonisation and exploration began in four different solar systems in and around the same time in this Galaxy.
The four major species that came from these systems were to play a major role in the Early Stelliforous Era. These were Humans, Zeyons, Laftonians & Mullinarians.
You will learn about Humans & Humanity in separate classes & I will leave it till then.
The Zeyons were a fully robotic militaristic civilization. It appears that they turned on their biological creators, turning them into a slave class on their own world. They then began to search the cosmos in the search for resources obliterating anything that stood in their way.
Laftonian civilization was geared towards technological & spiritual progression. Although not well understood, their devout devotion to their God Loftus & the spiritual leader Lethus who gave Loftus’ directions, led to their name. Lethus appears to have survived for billions of years. It is speculated that he spent most of his life travelling at light speed, thus surviving for a very long and extended period.
Physically they were smaller but significantly stronger than the average human. This is because the homeworld of the species had a relatively strong gravitational force.
Mullinarians were an insect species. They came from a unique homeworld with an oxygen rich atmosphere, which led to their large relative size.
Physically they had six legs, two of which they normally used for object manipulation. Fully upright they stood at twice the height of the average human. They had a significant disadvantage in that even on habitable worlds; they needed biospheres to increase the oxygen content. This led to their colonisation efforts spreading more slowly.
However they were superb at reproduction with each queen able to produce millions of eggs during her lifetime. Normally this ability was suppressed through contraception, but it was very useful when new worlds were prepared for colonization or at times of war.
Space Colonization generally occurs in four different phases
- Different planets within the original system e.g. Pluto in the Martian system. At this stage colonization is carried out by planetary governments & then corporations. As the distances & journey time involved are short with relatively advanced ion drives, the colonizers are mostly selected by skill set. In other words they were specialists in engineering, mining, science and industry. The spaceships of this time were small but highly manoeuvrable.
- Neighbouring Solar systems – Carried out by corporations for profit. Genetic selection of potential colonisers started to play a much greater role. In particular females who have a high probability of having large families were heavily selected for. These females have a genetic predisposition to pregnancy as their bodies would make them feel euphoric. The Colonisers originally would have been transported in “long ships”. These were large vessels built for endurance rather than agility. In the beginning when ion drives were used colonisers would have been transported in the form of frozen fertilised eggs, which would then be implanted into surrogate wombs on nearing the destination. This was due to the very long time it took to travel between stars.
Later with the invention of the Higher Gravity Drives, this became obsolete as it was advantageous to have fully grown humans on arrival.
- Frontier Exploration & Colonization – The inhabitants of the outer worlds then through a mixture of immigration and high birth rates then have their own populations to move outwards. They create their own “long ships” and repeat the process. Over a few hundred thousand years the number of inhabited systems vastly increased.
- Eventually the frontier would meet a barrier. Towards the centre of the galaxy there were impassable collections of neutron stars and black holes. At the other end of the spectrum, there were the massive voids between galaxies which were an impassable barrier for millions of years.
However, the most common barrier occurred when different species’ civilizations collided. Pressure would mount on the frontier as immigration & high rates of reproduction at each border would lead to agitation for war.
Later in your cells you will be doing your assignment, which is to read unaided by exoset, a ghost written account of the first interstellar war by Malthus. You will find your copies on the desks in front of you.
Malthus was the senior ion drive engineer for the Galthusian Army on the planet Martan. Martan was a frontier world whose star system was bordering Mullinarian space.
Martan did not require a biosphere & it had an atmosphere that was just barely conducive to human breathing with an oxygen content of 4%. It was tidally locked to its star, a small red dwarf. It had a mass similar to that of Earth in the original Martian system.
Unlike in the class today, all the inhabitants were pale skinned. This skin colour was selected for when the first colonisation ships departed because of the very poor luminosity of its star.
There were two other inhabited planets in the system – Phobos (the most outer planet) & Zenith (closest to parent star). However, these two planets had no atmosphere & the humans lived underground in small mining colonies.
It must be borne in mind that at this time there were no federations of stars & very few planetary governments. Martan itself had ten different regional governments. Prior to the war, although covering by far the largest area, the Republic of Galthusia would have ranked third in relation to military & economic might. It had a large central mountain range covering two thirds of its area. Most of the population lived in dense mega cities close to the sea.
Its economy was dependent on exporting mining products to neighbouring countries. Relatively speaking this was an unproductive agricultural planet as plant growth tends to be slow around Red dwarf stars.
The communications from the Professor then abruptly stopped. Lance then surveys his classmates rapidly transport out of the chamber.
The communications had only taken a few seconds. He lodged an entry in his exoset to the required reading in ten hours. He thought about how different & primitive ancient times were. He felt a strange emotion, possibly excitement thinking about it as he put his assignment, which looked like a few hundred pages into his inside jacket pocket. It seemed so dynamic compared to the austerity of his existence.
He had an hour to spare before his next lecture. Maybe brush up on his physics or play some 3D chess over the exoset. Chess was a useful way to whittle away the odd hour so he logged on.
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