The Easy Way Out - A Sci Fi Lullaby

I always liked doing things the hard way. When I was a kid I travelled round Europe on boats and trains, journeys that might have taken an hour by plane stretched out into days of sitting still laced with occasional bouts of running, clutching a rucksack and panicking at various incompetent people in various uniforms in various half-learned languages. But when I arrived I knew where I was. Too far from a warm bed was where I usually found myself, and too poor to buy any food more complicated than bread and apples. And so here I am again, the silly little luddite pretending to have adventures in a world that has long since dispensed with them.

The elevator isn’t what I had hoped for. No huddling emigrants, no whimsically bearded road-prophets. Hardly anyone in fact, a couple of rich families and a handful of old people whose cataracts would most likely ruin the whole experience for them. There is no jolt as we depart, no crunch of machinery and no cheerful daydreams about what if something goes wrong. All you get is the carefully-plotted acceleration curve and the gradual, predictable sight of the jungle city below contracting out of sight. The landscape stays the same for longer than it seems like it should, just more and more jungle refocussing itself as the frame of reference swings outwards. The interesting part is when you first notice the absence of down, when it occurs to you that you’re actually travelling sideways, glued to the wall by the acceleration which you still haven’t really noticed. To your left is a planet, a concept which seems increasingly irrelevant as the journey goes on. To your right is something much more real. Gradually we trickle out into the place where moving in a straight line never brings you back to where you started, where the directions are decided by a computer display and not by the vicissitudes of gravity.

A rather bored computerised voice suggests that we begin to move towards the edge of the hemispherical floor we are standing on, as acceleration is fading out and spin will soon be taking over the holding-us-down duties. Another sensation that should be more interesting than it is, waching the passengers fan outwards following the slowly shifting light trails on the floor until we are all opposite someone else and have to look up to see their version of down. We’re not as heavy as we were with the acceleration but the change is so slow that you barely notice. A man to my left, insofar as I have a left in this rather foolish orientation, discovers the change in weight only when he tries to sip from his coffee cup. One of the old folks nudges another and relates a story about the first time he made that same mistake. Coffee man seems all too aware of the unsettling range of angles from which people are watching him try and suck the coffee fom his tie.

At the top our own spin is timed to perfection as we slot into the doughnut hole in the spinning satellite. You have to climb out through the floor of course, down a narrow ladder, and this time you do feel the gravity lurch back up towards the normal Earth level. You don’t notice that the whole thing is spinning, there’s no room in the departure pod for windows. The ship is there waiting. Passes are scanned, irises are scanned, minor arguments erupt over contact lenses, coffee in more cleverly designed receptacles is acquired from the vending machine, and then it’s down another poky little ladder tunnel onto the Montpellier II. The Montpellier is as classless a vessel as I had hoped it would be, and the enjoyment of it is spoiled even more by the now unpleasant spin-gravity level this far out from the hub of the satellite complex. This is what I came for, the grimy seats and the awkward low ceiling. The tiny little window fogged with the slime from a thousand curious children’s noses. The other passengers wrestle with their luggage, each item topped up with bricks since we left the elevator, and curse the absurdly narrow storage bins and their tempremental door catches. I only have what fits in my pocket, as the wife is taking all my stuff through the warp gate. A minor punishment for her refusal to join me on the long way round, as if that wretched nausea wasn’t punishment enough. If you’ve ever smoked ten cigarettes before breakfast then hit yourself on the temple with a cupboard door while falling off a skateboard then you’ll know everything you need to about the joys of warp gate travel. I do admire the theatrics of it though, that ridiculous setup whereby you jump into a hole in the floor and another hole spits you out of the wall somewhere else. Something to do with transfer velocity apparently, but I suspect that the inventors simply had an evil sense of humour. In all of human existence there are few greater joys than watching people tumble out of warp gates. Presidents, empire builders, leaders of men; they’re all made to look like utter twats. And the more goons they have waiting to catch them, the more people there are to look on and snigger. Seat straps on. Big bloke in a jumpsuit passes by to wrench them tighter. If he only had a rollie in his mouth we might be at the funfair. Finally the satisfying scrape of the spacecraft and the elevator hub parting company, then the slithering decay of the spin-gravity as our trajectory levels out. Coffee man is now glad of his coffee-tie, as it appears to function just as well in zero gravity.

The journey is incredibly boring. My attempts to engage the other passengers in a singalong fare about as well as did the first three space elevators;
“Fly me to the moon and let me…”
“Fuck off!”
Someone lights a cigarette. You’re not allowed to smoke but there’s no crew besides the two men in the cockpit, and thankfully they are busy. The smoke looks more beautiful than the curling, shrivelling horizon we saw from the elevator. A child toys idly with globules of his own spit. A little spaceship icon on a little screen sits between the Earth and the Moon and moves tectonically along it’s simplified, dotted-line path.

“Holiday is it mate? You’ve not brought much with you,” someone asks.
“Research trip.”
“Oh yeah, what are you researching then?”
“The moon,” I tell him. My tone is lost on him. He actually seems surprised, more interested now if anything.
“Trying to figure out what it’s made of eh?”
“No, it’s made of rock. We know that already. I’m trying to figure out where it is.”
“Well hopefully the pilots know that already.”
“Not exactly they don’t, they don’t know where it is in enough dimensions for my purposes. If we take the right measurements we should be able to trace it backwards through time and figure out how it was formed, and maybe how its trajectory through space influences phenomena such as tidal locking and orbital irregularities,” I explain. Job done, he’s lost interest.
“Sounds fun,” he grumbles, before turning away to examine a fascinating lump of nothing that’s just caught his eye. I would try and explain properly what my research involves, but to be honest I really don’t know. I know how to set up the machine, but it’s the physics types who know what it does and why it needs to do it. I just built the fucking thing, engineers as usual bailing out the ‘real’ scientists who more often than not can’t make toast without written instructions. They definitely couldn’t make this spaceship, although looking around me I’m not sure that that isn’t a point in their favour.

I lose the will to live. Forty-five minutes later we land at Quantum City. None of the passengers can resist taking a few big leaps as we step out of the claustrophobic coffin of the Montpellier II and into the big steel bubble of the hangar. Infinitely prettier spacecraft glisten smugly at us as we wobble towards the reception gate. More irises are scanned to make sure nobody has changed their eyeballs since the elevator hub. A phalanx of important-looking uniformed types appears from beyond the reception gate. After a few abortive attempts to walk towards us in a menacing fashion, they decide to stay put and wait for us to come to them. They seem to be carrying tasers in a complex with metal walls which doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
“Professor David Ross?” the head uniform type asks everyone in turn. I consider just putting my hand up and admitting it’s me but the lad seems to be having such fun booming at everyone that I haven’t the heart. This is proper travel; constant hassle. Unpleasant surprises. And I nearly took the fucking gate as well, the wife wanted me to. Happily my project manager insisted I go the old fashioned way, paid for the ticket through the department and everything. He’s clearly married himself, he must know how good it feels to have an excuse to defy your wife for once.
“Professor David Ross?” The uniform finally gets to me.
“That’s me. Didn’t realise they did cavity searches at moon customs.”
“This is not the time for jokes Professor, the complex governor needs you at the warp terminal immediately.”
“I expect my wife is causing a fuss about something. After you, please.”
I follow the men into the city complex, trying not to bounce too much as I go. The other passengers look rather upset that I’ve bypassed the queue for the check-in scanners, and I get a special kind of scowl that’s clearly reserved only for class traitors.

“What was in your luggage Professor Ross?”
There are no niceties here. In fact the governor looks not long out of bed. His weighted boots allow him to pace back and forth with an appropriate level of gravitas. The warp gate glows ominously behind him. Computer terminals crackle and smoulder in a way they really shouldn’t. A single sprinkler urinates feebly onto a corner of the room with nothing in it.
“I didn’t have any. All I have is my car keys, which I probably don’t need, and some chewing gum.”
“I understand you sent luggage ahead with your wife, what was in there?”
“Is she here? Is she in a cell somewhere by any chance? She so often is.”
“Your wife is…around somewhere. It’s very important you tell me exactly what you had in your luggage.”
“Ordinary things, clothes, books. A few spare parts they sent me with, stuff for the big accelerator you have out here.”
“What parts specifcally? They must have been things we can’t make up here in our own labs.”
“There were some trip coils, fairly basic but you need full gravity to get the alignment right. Other than that there was a couple of mirrorfoam plates…”
“Shit. That’ll be it, the mirrorfoam.”
“What’ll be it? That’ll be what?”
“Your luggage caused a problem with the warp gate.”
“What sort of problem?”
“They call it feedback. Mirrorfoam plates, if you line them up in a certain way, can make a sort of warp interface when subjected to strong electrical fields. Basically a tiny version of the big warp link we have to Earth, and it only lasts for microseconds, but it’s unfocussed. The plates refract the interface but don’t contain it. Ordinarily the whole thing collapses straight away and all you have is two very broken bits of mirrorfoam, but if you somehow get both sides of the interface on either side of a warp gate, the whole thing starts to spiral out of control. It’s only ever been a theory up until now, one of those ‘theoretically possible in the sense that everything is theoretically possible’ things, black holes from supercolliders sort of stuff.”
“So what actually happened?”
“Well we’re still not sure. Whatever happened roasted a lot of circuits, including communication stuff that we need to talk to Earth. It also, well it sort of disintegrated your luggage.”
“All of it?”
“And your wife.”
“All of her?”
“Only most of her I’m afraid. Her left hand was still on the other side of the gate when the feedback loop collapsed, it managed to get through unharmed under it’s own momentum.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m terribly sorry. We put what we could find through the mass spectrometer and it certainly looks human.”
“I’ve got it!” a young man yelled from behind a computer screen in a corner of the room.
“Got what?” the governor asked, clearly glad of the opportunity to stop talking to me about my vapourised wife.
“Earth,” the voice called out.
“Good man, put them on speakers would you,”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that sir, I’ve found Earth but not on the radio. It’s on the video feed sir. That is, the cloud of dust where it used to be is on the video screen,” he said, his voice trembling to a halt as he realised what he’d just said.
“The Earth is gone?”
“Yes sir, and I wish that was the worst of it sir.”
“The Earth is gone and that’s not the worst of it?”
“No sir. There are over twenty thousand people in Quantum City alone, almost half a million moonwide.”
“Well that’s good isn’t it? We’ve still got some sort of human race left at least.”
“Yes sir, but you see the feedback system would have destroyed the planet in under a second. Most of the mass of the Earth was dismantled back down into energy and transported off to random parts of the galaxy through the warp folds.”
“Why didn’t it destroy the moon as well?”
“Just the angle of the warp field alignment I think. Their gate was in the floor, ours is in the wall. Different transfer velocities you see.”
“Never mind that, mass of the Earth…”
“Yes sir, well it’s all gone. So there’s nothing holding the moon in its proper orbit any more. So we’re going to fall into the sun.”
“I see. Anything we can do?”
“No sir. There’s room on the spacecraft we’ve got in dock for less than 1% of the moon’s population, and there’s nowhere for them to go anyway.”
“Fuck,” the governor says, with heartbreaking sincerity.
“Fuck,” I add, feeling rather outdone by the enormity of it all.

This is, it has to be said, quite a party. We’ve got about four hours before the air is replaced by helium and we all quietly die; consensus decided that would be preferable to everyone slowly roasting to death in the sunshine. The governor opted not to tell anyone about my involvement in the destruction of the human race, he just said it was a tragic accident and hinted that it was a blunder on the Earth side of the gate that did it. People seem to be genuinely happy, and not just because all alcohol rationing has been lifted and none of the people fucking in the corridors need to worry about protection; in four hours absolutely nothing will matter any more, or ever again. I of all people should probably feel pretty terrible, but I don’t. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, well perhaps not exactly like this. In all probability humanity’s end would have been infinitely more protracted and painful than it turns out to be, and I at least can say that I enjoyed my life. I always travelled the long way round so I could see more of everything. I always did things the hard way, but still it’s oddly nice to give people an easy way out.