Chapter 13

“We are going to need a Mike on board the SE4 permanently, as we want to start preparing it for a first contact situation.”

“Commander Mike, reporting for duty sir!” he said, giving me a salute.

“Get your design table going, we want to design a probe that can be controlled by staff on Proxima Station who are working in Exploration.”

“Already set up,” he said, spinning on his heels, and heading back into the lab.

“Let’s make a list of what we want the probe to do.”

“Send and receive radio messages,” Mithra offered.

“It needs a telescope to look around,” Tyr added.

“It should have thrusters for control, and you’ll need radar if I’m not the one driving it,” I added.

“How about armor, or a self destruct?” Mithra asked.

“Let’s leave weapons off, but I’ve got an idea for a bit of armor that won’t be too heavy,” I told him.

“Is it reflective?” Tyr asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Reflective and ablative is best for defense against energy weapons. Missiles are different.”

“If it gets fired at, I can either wrap a cloak around it, or store it into safety,” I offered then, I continued

“Now this is my idea for thrusters,” I began. I outlined my idea to use a pearl that would transport water into a tank. Another pearl would disassociate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which then would be ignited as rocket fuel.

“Why bother putting the water on the vehicle? Just put the pearls that disassociate on the vehicle. Having them mixed is dangerous, but it’s better than having all that weight,” Tyr suggested

“Hydrogen and oxygen are only explosive over certain temperatures, and pressures. Design for below that, its not like you need to keep it pressurized to increase storage capacity,” Mithra suggested.

“Super cold is not an issue. I’m planning a fimbulwinter armoring system. Small hexagons filled with compressed hydrogen, in overlapping configurations so that there is a minimum of two layers. It’s very reflective, and if one breaks, the ejecting gas should diffuse any laser type weapon. Honeycomb armoring,” I told him.

We got to work designing a probe. We decided that it needed full scanning radar, so I provided a nice radar system from a fighter jet. Before long several people were contributing to the design. Doris created a nice camera radar interface that showed the radar return overlapping a video camera view of the same area.

The final probe was the size of a school bus. A modified Hubble with a directional radio antenna, six APG-77 radars from an F-22, an RS-25 engine from the space shuttle, modified to burn a premixed fuel, and attitude thrusters using compressed gas. Each probe was connected to our system using a newly built ‘Urchin 2’, each new probe connected to it to serve as a fire break in case of a disaster.

Water was provided by me forging a massive water tank on the sun side of Proxib, buried underground to maintain temperature, and filled with conjured water. The supply pearl sat at the sloped bottom. It fed into a pipe on the urchin, pushing water at 90psi into one end of a dissociation pearl, a universe where atoms repel each other instead of bond. A conjured copy of each dissociation pearl had a release valve, as long as the engine was firing, it would send the fuel air mix into the combustion chamber.

On Proxima Station I created a new hab module, a spinning torus that became the new exploration command office and increased the space with simulated gravity by 500%. I also had to add additional golf ball style habitation modules for all the new people needed.

Once complete, I began sending out pearls 4 times a day, each set to arrive about 1 hour after being dispatched. 3M got the job of being the first probe operator as it was dropped as close to the target star Lacaille 8760 as possible. He had mapped out a route to visit all the possible stars with planets that might harbor life.

Everyone else watched him as he used his control console to maneuver the probe, looking for planets. By dropping him ridiculously close to the star, it eliminated guesses as the direction he came from, and made it easier to identify planets as they would be shining brightly in the sunlight.

One by one they dropped out as they each got their turn at a probe. The first day I had promised to send pearls to one new star system for each of them. Each headed off in a different direction to follow a chain of potentially habitable stars. Even Nora and Em got a chance to take turns to pilot the sleek silver probe from a control console in one of the spare rooms in the penthouse.

I didn’t take a probe to control, instead I remained on duty to jump the SE4 into any world that had intelligent life, and to perform lifeforms scans if they found any potentially habitable worlds. The easiest way was for them to maneuver within 800,000km, or they could request a small probe be shot off at the planet they wanted scanned.

I really needed a way to automate the probe searches for the other stars we were skipping. I could only think of one solution. I brought it up with Thomas when he came home for the Thanksgiving break.

“Thomas, my boss needs an AI that can operate some prospecting equipment. They have trained controllers, but they get bored.”

“How do they operate them?” he asked, intrigued.

“It’s all remote operated, think mini subs scanning the water and sea floor. For the most part the scanning is automatic, it’s recognizing interesting results, and staying on duty for long stretches at a time that’s difficult. I think that something like your Bee might be the answer.”

“If they are using game controllers to operate the equipment, then it would be relatively easy to program Bee to perform a search pattern, report results, and identify unusual data.”

“Can you come to my office tomorrow? My boss will be there, and he’d like to either purchase Bee, hire you, or both if possible.”

“Sure! What time?”

“9am, and try to dress nice.”

“I can do business casual dad. I’m in jeans and a t-shirt cause I’m at home, and inside.”

“Dress warm, we are taking your new vehicle tomorrow too.”

“What! When did you get me a car?”

“The boss brought it.”

“For me?”

“For me, actually, but I think it’ll be better for you for getting back and forth to MIT.”

“What kind of car?”

“It’s not exactly a car. Have you ever heard of the Arcimoto FUV?”

“No.”

“The boss just signed a deal to provide the power packs for the new extended range version.”

“It’s electric?”

“Yeah, just a 2 seater, but the 200kwh battery, well technically it’s a supercapacitor, will let you drive to MIT on a single charge.”

“What’s it’s range?”

“Go look it up, and when it warms up this afternoon I’ll let you take me for a ride.” I told him.

“This is so cool dad,” he said staring into his phone.

“Yours has all the options, including full doors.”

“But they can detach when the weather is warm right?”

“I think so. Anyway the new extended range isn’t on the website yet, but it’s 10 times bigger than the original battery, so you can just multiply everything by 10.”

“That’s 1200 miles of range in city!”

“The range at highway speeds is only about 45% of that.”

“That’s still plenty to do the 200 miles to MIT without stopping.”

I took him for a short ride, before turning the vehicle over to him to drive. I did make him take me to a Starbucks where he flirted with the barista at the window, and got her number to take her for a ride when she got off work. He wasn’t really my kid, but I was still pretty proud of him.