Chapter 6

Myron Meyers had woken up on Mars, young, in vibrant health, and all his hair back for the first time since age 26. When given the option of going back to Earth with no memory of the event, or staying on to help run stellar cartography and the Proxima B Telescope, he was easily convinced.

The hardest part for him would be trying to figure out if he just wanted to die in his sleep, or be twinned with an old body left on Earth, not allowed to tell anyone of his discoveries. I didn’t even bother with forcing him to make that choice, or allow the security risk.

“Myron, you can either return to your old body on Earth, with no memory of this event, or you can stay as you are, and have simply died in your sleep on Earth. I’m willing, if you want, to give you the option of going back with no memory, and offering this again in six months, but by that time you likely won’t be offered a job in the management team, I’ll have found someone else for that role.”

“Can I do both? You keep a copy of me like this, and return a copy to wake up with no memories of coming to Mars?”

“Why? What have you got that you don’t want to miss out on? Hot date?” I teased.

“Great granddaughter’s birthday party is in a week, if I die now, it’ll ruin the party.”

“Sure, I’ll let you wake up on Earth, but I’m not going to promise that you’ll live that long, that’s up to your body, your caregiver, and your ability to look both ways before crossing the street.”

He laughed, and stuck out his hand to shake on it. I took him through the standard induction and initiation to the brotherhood, where he picked a dark red, almost maroon gem, and a suitable name. Then I took him to the Temple for twinning, he would keep one copy on Mars.

“Everyone,” I said introducing him to the other 7 on Proxima Station, “This is Mithra. He’s left his life on Earth behind to join us here.”

“Call me 3M,” he said to the hand shakes of welcome. He stiffened at the surprise hug from Amy.

“I believe you knew Odin back on Earth,” I told him, “He went by Karl Klausner, back then.”

“Seriously, Karl?”

Odin blushed, “It’s just good to be young again isn’t it?”

“So very good!” he agreed.

Odin took him along for the tour of the station, and helped him get settled in. I meanwhile was working on finding and replicating equipment to improve our super Hubble. Mithra had given me a huge list of potential improvements, and detection upgrades that he had wished had been included in the original. I was busy forging a second telescope that we could mount next to the existing one.

The central cylinder was wide enough, and we could extend it if required, to mount several more telescopes. He also had helped me create a list of exploration targets of places where Earth like worlds might exist. Previously I had just been going down the list of the nearest stars as I worked out the IP flight system.

He agreed with me that everything within 20 light years needed to be checked just for the sake of security, so the next two targets were Wolf 359 and Sirius, both leaving from Sol. Followed by Ross 154 from Barnard’s Star, and Lalande 21185 from Wolf 359. I was growing in ability enough that I was comfortable flying two IP drones at 500x each. I was expecting to increase that as time went on, but it let me actively head toward 3 systems at once. Two at 500x, and one at 100x was much faster than one at 1000x and two at 100x.

IP5 leaving from Sol had the 1.58 light year boost leaving from a prepared pearl outside the system. It was on track to reach Wolf 359 in 37.6 days at 500x time. IP6 after finding nothing of note at Barnard’s Star was free to head for Sirius from Sol with an arrival time of 41.7 days also at 500x. If I could boost the time factor, it would be even sooner.

Lalande 21185 was closer than Sirius from Sol, but the hop from Wolf 359 was less than half the distance. Similarly the distance from Barnard’s to Ross 154 was a half parsec shy of being half the distance from Sol. The final destination to cover all the non brown dwarfs within 10 lightyears was UV Ceti A&B. Investigation of the close stars was considered critical to Earth’s safety.

The other cool thing happening was that we were finally getting closer to scanning the stars in the habitability list, the list of Stars that might support an Earth like world. It took a month for us to even find an engineer to redesign an existing telescope for vacuum operations.

Just after the first vaccine sale, we were feeling flush with cash when Adele came into my office. She sat down in front of my desk, and gave me a big smile.

“Are you still interested in building wind turbines?” she asked.

“Absolutely! What do you have?”

“A small company is putting up an initial 5 turbines. They’ve been working on approvals and fighting an idiotic local resistance group since 2015. It’s finally been fully approved, but the delays mean the group needs cash, and the original investors aren’t willing to add more.”

“How much, and what do we get?”

“We can purchase a single site, including all approvals, and put up our own prototype. They want 1 million.”

I pulled up the design specifications, and sent them to a TV screen on one wall. “My prototype design, signed off by the engineers, is 800 meters tall and has a blade length of 100 meters, the total height is 888 meters.”

“How much power will it produce?”

“At that altitude wind is constant, and GE has offered a Haliade X, 13 megawatt generator. With the larger wingspan we might even get 15. Even at 13 that’s 113 gigawatt hours a year. Large wind is getting .23 CHF a kilowatt hour for five years, then it drops to .13 CHF.”

She smiled broadly, “26 million the first year? What’s our cost to manufacture?”