The year is 2240, and it’s time to send the galaxy-class telescope arrays into the void. Eleven telescopes will work in tandem with each other to develop and deliver a clear picture of the entire Milky Way from one side of the relatively flat spiral galaxy. Another array of eleven will be on the other side, doing the exact same thing. This is all necessary so that the Project Stargate ships that are being sent in the next ten years have an idea where they’re going, and where they will be landing their seed plates. The two twin gamma ray detectors are responsible primarily for identifying obstacles, like supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes. These pose a danger to the ships, and might prompt course corrections to avoid them. The X-ray detector’s sole job is to catalogue the galaxy’s pulsars, by which the ships can navigate. If you can find the nearest pulsar, you always know where you are. Three optical telescopes, and two ultraviolet telescopes, work together to seek stars and their orbital bodies, so the quantum network can be mapped. The microwave telescope and radio telescope can help map the Milky Way too, but will mostly be looking for signals that could indicate the presence of intelligent life. The Stargate ships themselves are armed with such equipment as well, in case a particular star system needs to be ignored, or studied more thoroughly. The infrared telescope is the only one that isn’t really part of any of this. It’s going to be facing the opposite direction, just checking out the other galaxies, and relaying this data back to Gatewood.
Kestral, Ishida, and Saxon were not the ones who came up with Project Topdown. Nor did they even design the original plans. The public would be completely all right with the idea of mapping the galaxy from the outside, so the only reason they don’t know about it is because it’s too connected to Project Stargate, which is less socially acceptable. That’s why this is all being done on Gatewood, rather than back home. As Team Keshida was looking over the designs, they realized there were a few flaws. Long ago, Earth came up with the four pillars of spaceflight, which were Safety, Compartmentalization, Redundancy, and Modularization. The engineers for Topdown did not appear to have taken these to heart, so Keshida needed to make some adjustments. Every telescope in both arrays is important to the mission. Take one away, and the whole endeavor could be lost. The idea is to send these into quite empty space, with the nearest celestial body being thousands of light years away. If something goes wrong, there is no way to affect repairs, and this is not an acceptable possibility.
To solve these problems, Ishida practically scrapped the plans they were given, and engineered new ones. Companion ships will fly parallel to the telescope ships, equipped exclusively with replacement parts, raw materials, and mega-format industrial synthesizers. These will also deposit specialized seed plates on the border systems, so if all else fails, at least the project can go on eventually. She wasn’t the only one who worked on this. Their friend, Weaver, who had gone off with Mateo on the AOC, helped build special temporal components. She invented a teleportation shield, so that any debris in one of the ship’s paths will be instantly transported hundreds of meters away, safely away from the vessel. It appears that everything is ready to go, and today is meant to be the launch date, but Kestral isn’t so confident.
“Are we sure everything’s done?”
“I went over the checklist a million times,” Ishida assures her.
“I checked a million more,” Saxon adds. His arrival prompted them to rename themselves Team Keshidon.
“We have no time for hyperbole,” Kestral complains. “How many times did you each go over every single thing in the preflight book?”
Ishida sighs. “Over the last year? Seven and a half.”
“Why half?”
“I had to poop.”
“Be serious, Ishida.”
“I am serious, Kestral. This isn’t just your baby; it’s all of ours.”
“Less so mine,” Saxon admits. He only just arrived a few years ago.
“I understand that,” Kestral says to Ishida. “I’m not trying to diminish your contribution. Far from it. I’m the one who only went over the list twice, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.”
“Do you wanna wait another year?” Ishida asks.
“Could we?”
“No,” Ishida answers plainly. “This is happening. I can’t promise you that we’ve thought of everything, but I can tell you we added a hell of a lot more redundancies than the dumbasses who came up with this.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kestral acknowledges. “Do you feel like there are too few people here?” She looks around the command center. “I mean, there are only three of us. This is the biggest thing humans have ever done, and we don’t have a team? Why don’t we have a full team?”
“You’re spiraling, love.” Ishida places a hand on Kestral’s shoulder. “Our full team is humongous. We had three artificial general intelligences working various problems, and making calculations. Still more AI entities have been uploaded into the ships. They’re going to take care of everything en route. Our job is done.”
“What about the AI? Did we check the code? Are we sure there isn’t some huge bug? Or a virus. What if there’s a virus?”
“Who would have written a virus, and how would they have gotten it here?”
“Don’t look at me,” Saxon says defensively, even though they made no indication that they suspected him of anything nefarious.
“The refugees,” Kestral poses. “There are billions of them. We don’t know who they are.”
“The refugees?” Ishida asks. “These are the same refugees who came from a universe where they lived partly underground, and couldn’t even have electricity, or the evil white monsters that also lived on the planet might detect their presence? You think one of them is a hacker?”
“Okay, well what about the Maramon refugees? They were here awhile before they flew off to colonize a new home world.”
“Kestral,” Ishida says. “Stop making dumb suggestions.
“There is no such thing, my mother always said.”
“Your mother was stupid,” Ishida reminds her. She isn’t being mean. Kestral’s family was what the Earthans would call noncontributives. After money was abolished, and automation took over the world, people no longer needed to work. A citizen has the right to certain amenities, like a place to live, and food to eat. They do not need to do anything to earn these rights. They’re simply provided. Anyone who chooses to work—in some capacity—which may be nothing more than occasionally helping to design virtual constructs or simulations—is afforded other conveniences. They have access to any of these authorized virtual realities, they can travel anywhere in the solar system, and they can apply for relocation to an exoplanet, among other things.
Kestral’s parents chose to do nothing. They spent their days sitting around their arcunit, watching virtual entertainment that was converted to basic holography, and sometimes going for walks outside. Kestral had to seek out higher education, and eventually had no choice but to estrange herself from them. Plenty of noncontributives were perfectly fine individuals, but they at least got out and socialized. The McBrides didn’t even vote for their governmental representatives. Even noncontributives have the right to longevity treatments to give themselves very long lives, but the bare minimum requirement is first exercising their right to vote. They both died of age-related diseases several years ago, according to an automated quantum message Kestral received, but of course, she couldn’t have attended a service if she wanted to.
“I’m sorry. What were we talking about?” Kestral is the poster child for the absent-minded professor. She regularly gets lost in her own thoughts, and people around her either have to pull her back to reality, or just wait for her to come back on her own.
“You were really excited about launch day,” Saxon jokes, knowing she’s not an idiot, and doesn’t actually believe this. He continues, “you wanted to push the big red button yourself. I could get you one, if you want; it won’t do anything, but you can time it so it’s like you’re controlling the launch.”
“Ha-ha,” Kestral says in monotone. “I’m just doing my due diligence. I don’t think I’m asking too much.”
“You have been incredibly reasonable during this entire process,” Ishida says. “We have all done a great job here. Though it will be centuries before anything really comes of this, we should be proud of ourselves; you included,” she says preemptively, before Saxon can remind them yet again that he’s the new kid on the block. “A great writer is no good without a great editor to check their work. Your due diligence, and attention to detail was incredibly helpful. My God, you polished a lens once with a handrag.”
“I was bored, and wanted to see how difficult and tedious it would be,” Saxon explains.
“What was the verdict?” Kestral questions.
“Guilty on all charges,” he answers.
Ishida smiles, and takes a look at her watch. “The ships are scheduled to leave in eighty-three minutes. We need to depart in eleven if we want to get good seats.”
“Has anyone done a preflight checklist for our observation vessel?” Kestral asks in feigned urgency. She’s finally starting to feel like she can relax. The ships are indeed leaving in an hour and a half. If something were to go wrong, it’s pretty much impossible to stop it now. They have no choice but to wait, watch, and hope.
Saxon recognized it was a joke, but replies with the truth anyway, “I did, yes.”
“Does anyone want popcorn?” Kestral offers.
“Gross. No, thanks.”
They boarded their little ship, which was mostly clear, so as to see nearly all sides out of it. They flew away from their centrifugal cylinder, and headed towards the midway point between it, and the shipyards. From here, they watched all ships for Project Topdown fly off to the intergalactic voids. One went for the top...and the other went down. Everything went flawlessly, and for the next four years after that, they reported nothing but smooth sailing. Then something strange happened.
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