A Larger Universe Read online

  A Larger Universe

  By James L. Gillaspy

  Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013 by James L. Gillaspy

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Acknowledgements

  This novel would have never reached this form without the help and honest critique of the members of the Atlanta BordersSFWriters group, especially John Adcox and James Lock. My wife, Elizabeth, read the manuscript at least four times, providing English grammar assistance and supporting my need to spend those long hours in front of my computer screen.

  The cosmology and space drive in the novel I derived from "Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall, a book I strongly recommend if you like your physics "out there." I don't know if any of my "engineering" interpretations of her theories are possible, but they do move the novel and the starships along.

  I'm not in any way suggesting that this work compares to those of Heinlein, but I wanted to write a story like those that I immersed myself into as a teenager and still enjoy reading as an adult: adventure in space, technology that seems possible if perhaps a little far-fetched, believable aliens, conflict with a space battle or two, and human ingenuity winning out in the end. I chose to do this in the context of a "coming of age" story, which those of you who read Heinlein will recognize as one of his themes.

  If it matters, I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a graduate degree in business. I worked in systems for 45 years (hence the computer references in the story).

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Be Careful What You Wish For

  Chapter Two: Not in Georgia Anymore

  Chapter Three: Discovery

  Chapter Four: You've Got To Be Kidding

  Chapter Five: Everything is Relative

  Chapter Six: And your Reward Will Be…

  Chapter Seven: Assignments

  Chapter Eight: Ride the Rails

  Chapter Nine: A Disagreement

  Chapter Ten: Something in Return

  Chapter Eleven: Does This Seem Familiar?

  Chapter Twelve: A Surprise

  Chapter Thirteen: A Story Told

  Chapter Fourteen: Value Perceived

  Chapter Fifteen: Bigger Things

  Chapter Sixteen: A Larger Universe

  Chapter Seventeen: Shopping

  Chapter Eighteen: Closing Doors

  Chapter Nineteen: Rebellion

  Chapter Twenty: The Kadiil

  Chapter Twenty-one: Networking

  Chapter Twenty-two: No Place Like Home

  Prologue

  A few thousand people enjoying a warm, cloudless night under the stars were the first to see the object. Silver and roughly spherical, it eclipsed the full moon between one blink of the eyes and the next. Seconds later, a spray of meteors streaked across the sky.

  The next people to detect the object were military radar operators watching for incoming missiles. Their alarms rang simultaneously with others of the military charged with maintaining the Global Positioning System.

  Except for local programs in progress, every television station in North America began transmitting snow as network feeds were lost. Satellite radios and satellite-fed televisions began to hiss in mid word. Within thirty minutes of the object's appearance, every device in orbit over North America had tumbled into the Earth's atmosphere.

  As the alarms spread over the communications channels that remained, ground-based radar confirmed the object moved under its own power. Telescopes resolved the single object into many: a central sphere more than twenty thousand meters in diameter surrounded by hundreds of smaller objects, each less than three hundred meters long.

  As the sphere circled the earth, a flat, unaccented voice blanketed the radio spectrum, repeating a message in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. The demands in that message sent heads of state to their undersea cable, cold-war, hotlines.

  Without waiting for a response, the sphere and its escorts vanished, leaving Earth’s governments in turmoil.

  Months passed before any connection was made between the sphere and the disappearance, four years before, of a small boy.

  # # #

  Over one-hundred light years from Earth’s sun, a blue and white planet, accompanied by an airless moon, orbited a pale yellow star. The planet’s oceans were too large for it to be mistaken for Earth, and its night side showed no sign of cities, but a closer look would reveal life in all its myriad forms.

  Above this planet, a few hours after the departure of the alien ship from Earth’s orbit (as near as can be measured in relativistic spacetime) another, smaller, sphere appeared.

  Bristling with antennae rising above a corroded and pitted metal surface, the sphere gave the appearance of great age. Occasional ports dotted the hull. The largest of these, a wide, transparent, window at the “top” of the hemisphere facing the planet, curved over the heads of a score or more tall, tailed, alien creatures sitting at semi-circular desks. To the left of the center, and behind an alien watching a computer screen that would look remarkably familiar to someone from Earth, a lone human male lounged uncomfortably in a chair made for someone much taller.

  The alien sitting at the center desk leaned over to look at the monitor, where a single dot flickered at the one light second marker. "You were right," the alien said to the human. "A single Kadiil followed us."

  As the moon passed to the left of the ship, the alien seated in front of the monitor interrupted, “Master Tommy, what does this mean?"

  The human, Tommy, leaned around the mass detection operator. Three more dots flickered in three different directions, also at the one light second marker.

  "Ull, three other ships are already here!" yelled Tommy.

  "Master Tommy, look!"

  On the monitor, hundreds of specks emerged around the edge of the moon.

  From the radar console came a sudden cry, "Incoming missiles in our path!"

  An alarm sounded.

  "Lord Tommy, more are coming from behind us," the operator said, "over the top of the moon."

  On the screen, behind the missiles, three much larger objects emerged. Radar and gravity sensors quickly confirmed them as ships.

  "The raiders went to our first trading stop and waited in hiding for us," Ull, the captain, said. "Even with your new computers, the missiles are too close. We cannot transit in time to escape."

  “Wait,” Tommy said, as he dove, feet first, through a trapdoor in the floor.

  A few seconds later, Ull leaned down into the opening. "What are you doing? The insystem drive has stopped responding."

  Tommy didn't look up. "I know. I have control."

  On the monitor on the main deck, a red dot appeared and swept across the path of the incoming missiles, then disappeared. For an instant everyone in the ship felt a pulling sensation as if their heads were being pulled away from their feet. Another red dot appeared on the screen behind the ship and swept the paths of the missiles coming from that direction. Again the appearance of the dot was accompanied by a stretching sensation.

  On the monitor, the smoothly curving paths of the incoming dots became chaotic.

  Ull stepped down the ladder. "What did you do?"

  "I used the drive to create two small black holes and disrupted the incoming missiles. We have time now to transit now."

  "You did...," the rest he lost as Ull ran up the ladder, tail jerking from side to side.

  "Master Tommy! Master Tommy!" The mass d
etection operator knelt on hands and knees, shouting through the trapdoor opening. "Look on the monitor!"

  The screen displayed the characteristic moiré pattern of five incoming wormholes, none farther than ten thousand kilometers away.

  Tommy opened another window on his monitor to show the transit entry status. Ull had initiated the five-second countdown. The ship should be gone before the Kadiil ships arrived, but they would follow. Creating black holes must be included on the Kadiil’s list of forbidden technologies!

  He ran up the ladder. As he climbed, he looked up at the dome in time to see it turn black.

  Chapter One: Be Careful What You Wish For

  The director moved to where he could be seen by the man in the wingback chair and the three people seated on the sofa that dominated the small living room. He counted down from five with his fingers and, at one, pointed to the man in the chair who looked at the television camera and said, "Hello, I'm Bob Wilson for Channel Nine News. Tonight, we're in the home of Atlanta’s newest millionaire, Tommy Yates.

  "Atlanta is home to many software companies and the entrepreneurs whose computer skills made them rich. Tommy also made his money by creating a new software program. If that were all there were to it, we wouldn't be here tonight. Tommy’s unique. He's only thirteen years old.”

  He turned toward the group on the sofa and the red light on top of a second camera gleamed.

  "With Tommy tonight are his parents, Tom and Rachel Yates. Tommy, tell us about the program you wrote.” He indicated the box in the boy’s hand. “Is that a sample?”

  Tommy tried to moisten his mouth with his tongue as he rotated the box to face the camera and stared, blankly, at the reporter.

  Tommy's dad leaned forward and pointed at the brightly colored box. "That's how the program will be packaged in stores. It will also be available as a download." He took the box and held it closer to the camera to show Tommy's picture on the front. "Tommy's written a file compression program that cuts the time to download movies and other files by seventy-five percent.”

  Tommy shook his head and found his voice. "That’s not quite right," he said with a slight squeak. "The program’s only for downloading movies."

  He took a deep breath and looked toward his mom. Her fixed expression almost made him freeze again. He felt himself begin to tremble as he continued. "And it’s not really a compression program.” Tommy looked over at his dad who nodded encouragement. “It does reduce download time by seventy-five percent, though.”

  The interviewer looked down at his notes. “Can you tell our viewers something about how it works, Tommy?” He leaned forward and added, “Without giving away any trade secrets, of course.”

  “It works like a hologram.” Tommy shrugged. “Well, not exactly, but that’s how I got the idea.” He shifted toward the camera, breaking out from under his mother’s arm. “A hologram is made by shining a laser on an object and recording the light that bounces off onto film. Shine an ordinary light through the film and you see nothing. Shine that same laser through the film and the original object seems to appear.”

  Tommy grinned. I can do this, he thought. I know what I'm talking about. Why should I be afraid? "My program has two parts,” he continued, pointing at the box in his father’s hand. “The part that will be on your home computer and the part that the supplier uses to create the download file. The supplier will have a regular compression program to make the movie file as small as possible, and then my program makes it even smaller by extracting a standard reference file from the data stream.” He smiled again. “That’s the secret part. The reference file is like the laser and what’s left is like the film the hologram is stored on. On your home computer, an identical reference file is applied to the download, and then the file is decompressed.” He leaned back into his mother’s arm. “And you have the original movie in a quarter of the time.”

  The reporter looked blankly at Tommy for a moment, and then recovered. “Very interesting, Tommy. I’m sure some of our viewers understood that.” He smiled. “Even if I didn’t. How did you get started with computers?”

  Tommy looked at his father. “Dad gave me a computer when I was nine. All I did was play games until I found a book on programming at the used book fair. Programming is a lot more fun than games.”

  Tommy felt his mom's arm tighten, and he twisted his body to look at her. Her expression at the camera was mixed with some other emotion besides stage fright.

  "Most nights, I make him stop working with his computer and go to bed," she said. "I’ve caught him up at two in the morning staring at that screen." A look of confusion crossed her face, followed by one of determination. She looked down at Tommy. "I've always thought that was a waste of time. In spite of his success with this, I wish he showed the same interest in his school work."

  Tommy shrugged off his mom’s arm. "Mom! I do show an interest in my school work when it’s not boring." He leaned toward his father.

  The muscular arm his dad put around Tommy was almost as thick as Tommy's head. The look Tom Yates gave to the camera was one of obvious pride. "I got Tommy into math classes at Emory. He does show an interest in that.”

  "What else do you like to do, Tommy?" the reporter asked. "Your mother’s right. Sitting at a computer all day doesn't seem healthy for a young boy like you, even if you’ve made a lot of money."

  Tommy frowned and glanced at his mom. "Well, I was taking karate lessons, until Mom made me quit." He paused. "And I ride my bike. But, mostly, I read and work with my computer."

  "I understand you've had some problems with the movie industry about this product. How do you respond to their claim that this will increase the number of illegal downloads?"

  Tommy felt his face flush as his father broke in. "Tommy’s program should increase their sales of movies. We’ve agreed to sell the supplier side only to legitimate movie distributors. Unless they give away or lose the code that creates the download files, they should have nothing to worry about."

  "What do you plan to do with all that money, Tommy?" the reporter said with a wink.

  The reporter’s sudden smile made Tommy very uncomfortable. It seemed predatory, somehow. "I don’t know.” Tommy shrugged and looked at his parents. "We don’t know. I’ll go to school, I guess. Dad says we’ll find something to invest in. And, well, I’d like a new computer."

  The light on Tommy's camera went out, and the reporter faced the camera behind the sofa. "And there you have it, folks, a problem we’d all like to have: how to spend a million dollars. This is Bob Wilson. Now, back to Robert Hines in our studio."

  The phone calls started before the crew had dismantled their equipment. The calls came from realtors. They came from investment counselors and brokers. They came from charities big and small. They came from relatives they knew and some they'd never heard of. At first, whoever answered the phone told the truth: they didn’t have the money yet; the product wasn’t even in the stores. No one believed that. Hadn’t the reporter called Tommy a millionaire? Each call was interrupted by a call waiting beep. Finally, they stopped answering. At 10 p.m. Tommy’s dad unplugged the phones.

  The next morning, a Saturday, the front doorbell woke them before 8 a.m. After slamming the door in the person’s face, Tommy's dad plugged in the phone long enough to call the police. The doorbell rang three more times before the police arrived.

  Tommy's dad looked over the breakfast table at his son. "I hope we get the advance they promised us soon. If this continues, we’ll have to move."

  Tommy slumped in his chair. "But Dad, I like living here. My friends are here."

  Tom Yates didn't respond. Instead he turned to Tommy's mother. "In the meantime, the police gave me the names of several companies that offer protection services. We'll have to use our savings to keep people away from the house until the advance arrives."

  Rachel looked up from picking at her scrambled eggs. "I need an unlisted phone number or a cell phone, too. I don't like being cut off from my moth
er like this."

  Tommy shoved his chair back. "I never wanted all this attention. I wrote the program for me, because it was fun and interesting! I wouldn’t have shown it to anyone if I'd known this would happen, if you hadn't insisted! Selling the program was your idea!”

  His dad sighed. "It’s done. We signed the contract, and we can't back out now."

  Tommy's eyes stung. He hurried away from the table and through the door to the deck before his parents could see him crying.

  The second story deck overlooked a tiny yard and small lake beyond. He had played beside that lake for as long as he could remember. Towering eleagnus bushes, left to grow completely wild, hid the deck and lake from the front of the house and the cars that cruised his street. On the lake, Canada geese and mallard ducks swam in big circles. The birds lived on the lake year-round, and some were tame enough to take bread from his hand.

  On the street side of the deck, unkempt eleagnus branches draped over the rail. The foliage shook, and a black and white cat with a diagonal white streak across his face climbed through the vertical slats and brushed against Tommy's leg.

  Tommy bent over to scratch the cat's back. "What would we do with you, Potter? Cats don’t like to move, even when they're indoor cats, and you're an outdoor cat. You won’t know where you are. You might get lost, and I'd never see you again."

  Tommy sobbed and sat down in the middle of the deck, pulling the cat into his lap.

  He usually liked the fragrance of flowering eleagnus, but now the overpowering perfume made him feel sick. He buried his nose in Potter's back, trying to block the cloying odor with the smell of sun-warmed cat fur.

  The throbbing of helicopters coming from the west overwhelmed Potter’s purring. From over the trees on the other side of the lake came a formation of military helicopters, in a straight line of three, flying toward him. He lay back to watch them go over, pulling Potter onto his chest. The Army helicopter flights were a regular occurrence and usually passed to the north of the house.