Spexco

Chapter

1

The speed of light was so slow—relatively speaking. Dad said he was just a kid and remembered the day when the news nets reported the breakthrough. There had been some mishap at some lab somewhere, and a group of scientists accidentally discovered a way to ‘bend’ space. And while it technically was not traveling faster than the speed of light, it allowed an object to arrive at a point in space in a time frame that was less than it would have taken a beam of light to arrive at the same place. So for all intents and purposes, it was recognized as a means of traveling faster than the speed of light—or FTL.

Up to that time and throughout the twenty-first century, GLASA (or Global Aeronautic and Space Agency) and its predecessor, NASA, had developed propulsion systems that could generate enough thrust to hit speeds approaching 0.1 percent the speed of light. That seemed pretty fast, but with the problems of inertia and time it took for acceleration and deceleration, it still took months to go very far in the solar system.

For years, all the experts had pretty much concluded that finding a way of breaking that so-called impossible barrier was just simply something that was not meant to be.

Around 2030–2040, during some of the more aggressive exploration projects cosponsored by NASA, it was discovered that some of the moons around Jupiter and Saturn were extremely rich in minerals. One of the manned flights in 2037, a specially designed freighter, landed on one of the moons and brought back a junk of rock about two meters square. It turned out to be so rich in rare minerals—and some that didn’t even exist on Earth—that the value of the space rock was more than the trip cost, and then some. I would guess that it was the first time that a space flight actually paid for itself monetarily.

That just spurred a faltering space program, and now all of a sudden, there were a half dozen countries putting together well-funded flight programs in order to cash in on the newfound wealth. The environmentalists were especially doing all they could to encourage everyone who would listen to get out and plunder some other rock than our own for a change.

Then around 2060, some rich guy called Bill Branson, grandson of some guy who was trying to make commercially viable space travel, put together a group who actually built sizeable and portable mining operations that was shipped out in pieces and, once having landed on the moon (I would guess the first was on Ganymede), started immediate mining operations. Within six months, they started shipping back not just chunks of rock but separated and processed ore, ready for final processing. Each shipment sent back netted the company at least 10 billion dollars.

They were able to use some of the newly discovered minerals to fabricate highly stable environment chambers in which to live. They discovered tons of freshwater deep underground in frozen form, which they could use. They also found large supplies of hydrogen, methane, and carbon, and along with those new elements that they discovered, they actually had a very nice lifestyle. Some of the new elements discovered, coupled with the abundant hydrogen that they had on the planet, provided a means of a fuel supply that allowed them to carry enough fuel to get them a round trip. In essence, they lowered their costs and increased revenue—a businessman’s dream come true. They were actually selling seats on the biweekly launches, and the revenue from that alone almost paid for the trip.

Once established, there was a group of Chinese investors who put together an exploration effort with their sights set on Europa to do the same thing that Branson was doing on Ganymede. Unfortunately, their launch in 2068 failed, and fourteen people died in the attempt. That didn’t seem to stop them. There were at it again in 2070, this time with much success. Maybe they actually purchased one of the older launch vehicles from Branson. They made it to Europa in eighteen months and set up shop—again with the help from Branson’s people. While their operations, which became as optimized as they could make it, were not as profitable as those on Ganymede. They weren’t in it to sell their output but to send directly back to the homeland for use in their own country.

By the mid-2070s, there were several mining stations on the moons around Jupiter as well as Saturn. They became not only mining operations but also general living quarters for families, researchers, tourists, and a host of other people who just wanted to get off planet.

By the mid 2080s, people were getting tired of being subjected to the g-forces and long travel times that were required to make the trip. Those who had made the trip many times were showing strange physical and health problems. A group from the Progressive Party in the government had tried to pass some new laws curtailing the practice and travel associated with it. It had no legs and died a disgraceful death in committee in Congress. Since the nation had finally come to their senses and placed at the head a somewhat sound-minded and conservative government, the number of ‘nanny’ regulations diminished, and restrictions on most liberties were lifted.

This caused an avalanche of investment from private industry. Personal wealth jumped, unemployment dropped and has stayed below 3 percent ever since, and people became more interested in their own future and welfare and depended less on the government. In fact, the federal government had been reduced so much because of the elimination of many regulations and their respective departments that Congress almost became a part-time endeavor.

It reached a point where almost everyone saw that the future success of the nation and even the world was tied to the stars. If the moons and planets in our solar systems were this rich in resources, where would it end? There became a hunger for space that almost could not be satisfied. There was one problem. It took too long to get there, and it was painful in the effort. It seemed that everyone came to the conclusion that there had to be a way to, first of all, go faster and, second, to negate the effects of inertia. What good would it be if you could jump to some kind of warp speed, only to get plastered against the bulkhead in the process?

While some individuals wanted the government to commission a special group of scientists to work out the problems, the government was wise enough to stay out of the development but did provide some tax incentives for research labs—or anyone really—to address these concerns.

From 2080 to 2100, there were some promising efforts but nothing much. There were a few accidents, and even some people were killed, which prompted more action by the Progressives. It wasn’t until that fateful day in 2096 when a particular accident occurred that caused the breakthrough. They ran tests after test—after cleaning up the facility—and proved their theories. The three guys who developed it instantly became celebrities, not to mention billionaires. They sold their rights to various companies and countries who could afford it.

By early 2102, there were a couple of companies who were first to put the systems into a working ship and put it to the test. They still had the inertia to overcome, but the top speed of the craft was in fact impressive. VSR (Volarem Space Rangers) was actually the first company to put their ship to a decent test. They lifted off from their home port outside of Houston. They accelerated at nearly 2 Gs for almost an hour then dropped back to a little over 1.5 Gs and kept that speed until they were at 30 percent LT. They throttled back when they decided that the test was enough plus the fact that they really had no place to go. They returned and filed their report. Since then, there had been numerous tests and flights to push the boundaries.

When the speed of mining spacecraft and support ships became so fast that the time it took to transit between Earth and the functioning stations and outposts in the solar system was cut drastically, the world went crazy (or so I was told during the months following the discovery). The stock prices of all the space-oriented companies skyrocketed. Some religions condemned the breakthrough as something man was not meant to touch. They said that mankind, by breaking the light barrier, was disrupting the very fabric of space and time, upon which the laws of nature and God were created, propagated, and controlled.

Dad used to tell me stories of the riots that took place and the political upheavals that sprang up around the globe, even more than the usual conflicts. He also spoke of how everybody was so amazed at how fast ships could come and go to the distant outposts that people were frantically finding new products and services and it had seemed that the world had gone nuts.

The actual speed of light was never reached within the solar system due primarily to the effects of inertia and the proximity of planets to the starting point. The new speeds were amazingly fast, but it also brought new challenges. The hot topic of the day was trying to find a way to create an inertia dampener to keep the crews, passengers, and cargo from being crushed by the G-forces. Everything had to be secured in specially designed couches, crates, and cabins. Some advances had been made in the area. Even during the past couple of years, some grad students from the University of Des Moines had come up with a way to dampen up to almost 30 percent of the acceleration forces. While this helped a great deal, it still meant that the time it took to reach light speed was considerable.

Not long after the FTL (faster than light) drive was discovered, the movers and shakers realized that FTL, coupled with the lack of a complete dampening system, was still too slow. The world settled back into more of a routine, and life went on.

For short distances, the speed of light was never reached; too much energy was used for starting and stopping. In addition, the stress and strain applied to the people and things inside the ship made it more than uncomfortable to use on such short hops. Artificial gravity fields, which only partially counteracted the forces of inertia, and the use of the special couches (enclosures) made it possible to endure greater G forces than would otherwise be possible.

To truly take advantage of the FTL drive, the ships and their crews were venturing outside our solar system and setting their sights on even more distant systems and galaxies. The farther and faster they went, the more the scientists realized that even at light speed, it would still take forever to even get close to planets supposed to be inhabitable.

That’s why I said that the speed of light was slow. Imagine, if you would, the Sun being only a foot away; now imagine that it would take you over eight minutes to walk that distance. If you think that took a long time, then imagine if you need to walk to the next block or to school or to the next county. In relation to where you’re sitting, any inhabitable planets would most likely be across the country—if not on the other side of the world.

All that did was fuel the drive for the next batch of eggheads to find ways of multiplying the FTL systems coupled, of course, with the inertial dampener—or ID as it was called.

During the ensuing years, Dad got married to Mom, and they had three kids, me being the first and only son. Also during that time, the greatest scientists had been able to only increase that so-called ultimate velocity to about warp 1.5 (I would guess that they borrowed the term warp speed from some old twentieth-century video entertainment series), and while the term implies a nonlinear relationship to the speed of light, they used it in the same way as they used to use the term Mach and its relationship to the speed of sound and simply referred to the speed as a multiple to that of light.

After grad school, Dad worked as a propulsion engineer for a small start-up company in the state of Utopia. The San Francisco area had been devastated during a tsunami back in 2045, and over the next thirty years, they had rebuilt a large portion of what used to be called the Bay Area. SF Bay had been altered, and the city of SF had become an island. Many conservative groups at the time declared that it was the wrath of God that had done it. I wouldn’t know if it was God or simply a major shift in the undersea fault two hundred miles off the coast that caused it. Regardless, it changed the entire cultural and political structure of what used to be a single state of California.

In 2050 California had divided into two separate states. Not wanting to seem to copy the Dakotas and Carolinas, those in the north wanted to show the country that their place was the most progressive in the country, and they called it simply Progress or PR. Sacramento remained the capitol for PR. They could use the letters of PR because Puerto Rico had been invaded by Cuba and had remained a part of that country to this day. The US government at the time did not have the resources or the desire to go to battle with Cuba since Puerto Rico had pretty much been a financial drain on the US at a time when the budget was out of control anyway.

The dividing line started just below where San Jose used to be. Except for a portion of San Diego County in the south that was annexed by Mexico in a land-technology deal, the South pretty much stayed the same. In the South, the fight between Los Angeles and San Diego over which would be the capitol became so severe that President Wilson stepped in and worked out a deal with them to allow Bakersfield to be the state capitol. It retained the name of California.

By 2065 Oregon and Washington became so liberal and progressive in their philosophy and attitudes that they decided to merge, and they called themselves the state of Utopia. They were the first state to outlaw the old internal combustion engines—at least the ones that used fossil fuels. They adopted the electric vehicles but still allowed the hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) vehicles until around 2085. Now most of the country pretty much had only electric and HFC vehicles, although you could still buy a permit to own and operate antique cars powered by gasoline or natural gas if you want. It just costs a lot of money, and the number of permits was limited.

My grandpa Hank—or Papa—had an old gas-guzzler when I was young. It was an old 2095 three-cylinder two-door Austin. He said the cars used to be rated in how many miles per gallon of gas they could go and that if he wasn’t careful, he would only get around 115 miles per gallon (mpg). He used to tell me that when he was a kid, his grandfather used to have an old beat-up 2015 Chevrolet with six cylinders and it got only 30 mpg. I couldn’t quite grasp that whole concept.

Anyway, Alaska had succeeded from the union in 2035 and changed its name to the Republic of Alyeska (ROA), moved its capital to Wasilla, which was later renamed Palinville in honor of Sarah Palin. In my history classes, I had learned that after a failed attempt at the VP slot with some senator called McCain back in 2008, she worked behind the scenes for a number of years until, during the administration of President Monson, she was chosen to be the secretary of the interior and later was instrumental in Alaska breaking away from the union. She was actually elected the first president and served eight years before retiring and spending time with her family shortly before she died.

From history, I learned that ROA always had a stable economy even in 2085 when a group of Siberians crossed the newly formed land bridge between the two countries and tried to reclaim what they professed to was stolen land by the United States. Thirty years earlier, the old disaster that was once called Russia broke up even more than it did after the fall of something called the Soviet Group or something like that. It completely failed, and the entire continent was broken up into regions, alliances, countries, and kingdoms. Siberia formed its own socialistic republic and then, in an attempt to recapture what they thought were stolen resources, decided that the relatively young ROA was ripe for the picking, especially since it was no longer part of the United States and its backing.

The war lasted about four days. What the Siberians failed to take into account was the fact that every citizen in ROA was a member of the state militia and was well armed. They quickly learned not to mess with the Alyeskans. History showed that there were fewer than one hundred Alyeskans killed versus three thousand Siberians.

Alyeska used as a basis the US constitution but had fortified what used to be called the Second Amendment here; it became a formal part of the base constitution. They made other changes to make it more closely resemble the constitution as originally written. As far as I knew, they had one of the lowest crime rates and stable economies in the world.

Not long before the departure of Alyeska, Texas also succeeded from the union but left the name alone. Like Alyeska, they established a similar constitution, and in fact, they and Alyeska were strong trading partners and had strong economies. However, while Texas became independent, they did lose the southern tip of the state to Mexico in a line from El Paso to Houston. By 2035 the southern one-third of Texas was pretty much all Spanish anyway.

While the northeast remained part of the United States, they did form an economic trade union modeled after the old European Union, which dissolved into fragmented components in 2065. Their trade union was heavily laden with labor unions, taxes, and economic chaos. From what I could tell, most of the country just ignored them and let them do what they wanted as long as they didn’t try to infect the rest of the country.

After working in PR for a few years, my father moved his family to Raleigh, North Carolina, where we lived now. He developed some new equipment for a couple of small companies and wrote some complicated algorithms that formed the basis of many of the working models for inertia control to this day. He was smart and was able to retain ownership of those programs and equipment, which earned him from, what I understood, some significant capital. That meant that he was able to start his own company. He called it SPEXCO (SPace EXploration COmpany), and he wanted to develop techniques, equipment, programs, machines, and virtually anything to do with the idea of space travel and exploration.

My dad loved his work and was very good at it. Although he was the president, he was always involved with the main projects at the plant, and except for some of the details on every single project, he was up to speed with virtually everything going on at the plant. He was well-liked—for the most part—and let people do what they did best without telling them how or what to do. He was good at giving some solid guidelines with expectations along with the resources to do it and letting his people go to it. He was rarely disappointed. On a few rare occasions when there was a problem, he was always fair, and if the individual ended up leaving the company, they did so with little hurt feelings or resentment.

I was born shortly after Dad started the company, and I literally grew up thinking that SPEXCO was just an extension of our home. While we lived just outside of Raleigh, in Holly Springs, my dad would commute from home on Monday morning via his corporate air transport to the plant in near South Brunswick, a little north of Myrtle Beach, and he usually returned home Friday evening. We had a second home near the beach, and in fact, we lived there about half the time. Our summer home was only two miles from the plant, and Dad would either take his executive golf cart to work on pleasant days or simply ride his bike. As I started spending more and more time at the plant, Mom pretty much stayed at home in Holly Springs with my two little sisters. The girls were involved with some community programs, their own schooling process, and simply wanted to be near their friends. By the time I was thirteen, I pretty much lived at the beach house and spent my time at the plant.

Now after fifteen years, SPEXCO had sprawled to over five hundred acres with satellite offices in three continents and has major dealings with fifteen countries. Maybe that was how I became so fascinated with space travel and its related concepts. I have, on many occasions, gone with my dad to the lab and been able to see what went on there. I enjoyed going there with him, and I sincerely believed that he enjoyed my company. My face and name soon became commonplace among many of the scientists and lab personnel. I didn’t get a chance to become acquainted with many of the plant workers or general staff, but my relationship with the department heads and lead scientists almost won me the image of plant mascot. My dad always said that immersing me in the workings of the plant was just as valuable as my formal education.

Like many other kids, I was enrolled in the HES, or Home Education System. It was back in the late 2040s that the public education system became so encumbered with politics and gross incompetence that the US Department of Education and NEA were dissolved, and the public education system was turned completely over to the States and, more specifically, the respective counties and communities with only the simplest federal guidelines and suggestions. The local communities took hold of that structure and ran with it. The liberals at the time cried and bemoaned the death of the government-controlled educational system and promised that the education of the country’s youth would prove to be fatal. However, like most of the ideas of the so-called Progressives, their promises and forecasts proved to be completely flawed and without basis of reality.

The level of education of the population in general shot up. Inner-city schools started turning out kids with higher levels of knowledge and with desires to make something of themselves. It was amazing that once they figured out that effort and associated consequences were tied together, the success of the educational system catapulted the United States back into the forefront of the world’s educated people. Just prior to the demise of the Department of Education, the US ranking for student intelligence and education fell below that of most third-world countries.

Each school system became what essentially was the same as the charter schools that I read about from the twenty-first century. Funding was dropped for sports and extracurricular activities, and those programs were turned over to the local communities, who could elect to continue them or drop them based on the public support, corporate donors, or sponsors from certain families.

The locations and areas of the country that embraced this localized system of the educational process seemed to excel and always placed its students in the top cyber universities. Those communities that insisted on the well-known federal format seemed to produce—or failed to produce—students that could hardly spell their name or read a simple book. Those schools were mainly in the northeast. I thought that it had something to do with the unions or something. I never did understand how a group of adults put their own need for power and control over the educational aspects of the students. Dad tried to explain it to me, but he was mainly relying on what Grandpa had explained to him. Anyway, I was always more interested in how things worked, why, and how I could make them better.

With the development of the HES, the traditional grade levels became blurred at best. There was no such thing as a senior or sophomore in what used to be called high school. In fact, there were essentially no grade levels at all, including children in what was once primary or elementary school. What was developed was a set of three main levels—R (remedial), S (standard), and A (advanced). The RSA system pretty much told employers what kind of education you had and how well you could learn a new skill and what kind of value you would be to the company.

The A levels did have additional designations by adding 1, 2, 3, etc., to designate how advanced the level was and that there was some specific training in certain fields of study. Having an S level meant that you were qualified to do most basic functions in most plants or companies and, from what I understood, would have been considered a complete high school education and meant that you could function normally in society in most situations.

A level education became so specialized that in order to apply for a specific job, you had to sit a test and show that you knew the material for the job in order to be hired. It was not uncommon for individuals to get so involved with learning that many did not even keep track if they were A-1 or A-6. They just kept studying until they felt they had enough and wanted to start work. Course-specific testing was always done along the way. The course of study for any RSA level would be done at any speed and completed in the time frame suited to the student. The cost savings alone to the educational system was tremendous.

The teaching profession evolved into more of a counselor/coach situation, where they helped the student learn at a pace and a level that was best suited to them. Teachers were once again respected, and new methods of rewarding students for their efforts caused an explosion of educated people. Since much of the learning was done in a virtual classroom, more emphasis was placed on individual effort and less on the teacher trying to maintain order, discipline, and a pace suited to the slowest student in the class. They were rewarded according to how well their students did. The concept of tenure was abolished, especially at the A-level courses. If the teachers didn’t get the job done, their job was in jeopardy.

This, along with changes to the public welfare system back in the late twenty-first century meant that the government was finally able to get their financial house in order.

I read stories in my American History class how just during the late 1900s and early ’20s, the political process was dominated—and ruined essentially—by what used to be called the Democrats and Republicans. They fought over everything. They could rarely agree on anything that really made sense and were so petty that the country failed financially in 2035 and came close to being taken over by the Chinese. Had it not been for the major internal collapse of the old communistic government of China along with the nuclear disaster just outside of Beijing, the old USA would have been cut up into pieces and taken over by China and other countries.

During the early ’20s and specifically after the election of President Trump in 2016, the conservative movement really started to be assertive and became a major force over the next fifteen years. Had they become more involved with the governance earlier, we were told that the country would have averted the financial collapse in 2035 with its ensuing Great Depression II. The green movement was proven to be an arm of the old communists, and the global warming fiasco was shown to