Chapter 1

Welcome to my web said the spider; Dreams all flayed out in shimmering Net.

Joyce slowly woke up, she couldn't really remember what she had dreamed but those last words sort of had burned into her remembrance. She looked at the Ships watch, it showed seventeen hours standard ship time, well then, she could just lie down again and try to get some more sleep or, she thought, she just might get up.

She stretched languidly like a cat in the comfortable warmth of her bed for a moment and then threw the covers away, on for a shower she thought with a shudder. She was on the Sovereign merchantship Eleonora. Jointly owned by the merchant guild of Reykjavik and the king of Denmark. For the first time in her life she was actually going to travel in space. Oh well, she had made a few journeys before. But the furthest she had gone was to Saturn some mere light minutes from Earth. All in the course of her apprenticeship as a merchant electrician Second class. But soon the slight trembling from the Jon engines would stop and then the ship would prepare itself for the hyper jump, she sure as hell didn't want to miss that.

She remembered when she was small, those stories her Granny used to play to her, all locked into that old locker that no one were allowed to touch. About when Earth first discovered the mathematics for how to move an object seemingly faster than light and how almost nobody believed that it would work. She used to say that those stories hidden in her old casket were her special gift. Some day, she said to Joyce once, someday someone might just ask for them. When Joyce asked whom that would be, Granny just smiled at her and said. "Be real nice to them lass, they might let you go for a ride". Joyce remembered that she waited for them for weeks after, but nobody ever came. But they were lovely tales, maybe just slightly on the naughty side, but very nice. Oh yes, she thought, how was it that first part started now again? Yes, that was it...

"Only after long and careful experimentation had Earth allowed one Ship, manned with a mixed crew, to try the theory out!"

The Problem

The big problem was that even if it worked and the ship could make a jump, nobody could foresee where that jump would end. Say that the ship disappeared as expected, it should, they'd already tested that well enough with unmanned Ships, how would they ever know if it had actually survived out there.

There was no known way outside theoretical papers to communicate FTL ( Faster Than Light ), which made the speed of light an absolute. But try they must. The ways Earth were going, over populated, congested with constant wars about territorial as well as wealth distributions, all added up to making life a very unsafe occupation. In 2018 there was 23 major conflicts in 19 locations, not counting the minor ones.

A lot of Earth's unique fauna, flora and ecology were gone without hope of recovery, and human greed combined with the usual short time solutions were making sure that there would be no end in sight. According to SIPRI, a nonprofit source of armaments information, some sixty three percent of all nations' budgets worldwide were going into defense and armaments projects at that time. Earth desperately needed some new hope. Either that or the so called industrialized world would spiral down into the same declining poverty and disease ridden societies as the non industrialized third world, where life expectancies were down as low as twenty three years in some states. Even worse was that feeling of despair, entering as a foul breath in all and any attempts to create mutually attractive goals for the world.

So they created a minimal jump for that first manned flight.

Then, they sat down to wait.

After three years of waiting Earth had started to doubt, at the same time ever more smallarm-wars escalated into ever bloodier conflicts. Global warming saw to that Earths habitable areas shrunk ever so rapidly and not even the Nordic countries would be excused this time, every country for itself, rich against poor, Islam against Christianity, young against old.

Then a ship came back.

The wrong one.

It was one of the automated Ships, the Aurora9. They had programmed it to make some twenty jumps before trying to backtrack its course and hopefully end up where it came from. It also had carried with it "state of the art " equipment for analyzing and documenting its environment in and outside the jumps. As soon as they had recovered it they started to go through its recordings. By comparing its star charts with those taken from Earth they hoped to get an inkling of where Aurora9 could have been. The problem was that even after the most extensive study they still couldn't pinpoint any of Aurora9 jump-points. The most anyone dared to say was that there was a high probability that it at least was in their own galaxy.

As Aurora9 had shown up it seemed that world hostilities had somewhat cooled of.

Once more people started to look forward again as the results from her travels were downloaded to Earth and the Net. Even thou none could pinpoint where she had been as, there were ample evidence of Earth like planets in her trail. So there might be a way out after all.

The UN called for a general meeting to try to unite the warring states once more under a general goal. The response were not promising, The western nations that had stood for the most of the financial and scientific contributions viewed the results as mostly their own and were not prepared to lose control over the project. On the other hand, the so-called third world didn't find the project more important than f ex clean water, air pollution, food and medicine. In their view it was just one more example of how the already rich instead of acting responsible just tried to sneak away and get out. Both sides had their points, certainly the rich states had exploited the poor countries natural resources, and certainly there hadn't been any forethought of what might come of that exploitation.

But was that a problem shared only by the rich side of humanity? If the shoe had been on the other foot, as the proverbial saying goes, would it then have been any different? From where I stand. Probably not, human nature being what it is. As long as I have what I call mine and you have what you call thine, conflicts will emerge and in a fallible world. Might, not justice will be the final arbitrage of all.

Still, the third world had the right of it. There was a big problem with both our environment and our attitudes. There had to be some solution forthcoming, otherwise Armageddon was waiting around the corner either as a reaction by us fallible humans or as a natural reaction to the accelerating climate changes from our global overheating, or both. Competing for diminishing natural resources also had a strong influence on the problem. Something had to be done.

The industrialized world thought it had found the answer to the question.

Let's go away.

The Grail

In its timeless fashion the United Nations offered a compromise. After finding that there could be no reconciliation of the two views. The UN chose to do what it did best.

It founded a committee.

The purpose of said committee was, at least in theory, to find a way to do both things. That is, both to save our Earthly environment, as far as that now were possible. And find a way to allow the third world countries to have a "say so" in the planning for further colonization outside our solar system, in the so called Aurora project. As the UN committee started its work, the colonization project continued to go its own parallel way. And it put most of it proceedings on the Net. Because of the Net there was a lot more knowledge available out there. And when people find something to catch their imagination and they also have a connection to knowledge, learning actually can become quite a Joy. Off course the Net wasn't all what it once promised to be. It was to strong a powerbase for being allowed on its own. Both commerce and State had to put their fingers inside the meatpie, and with them came more and more legal restrictions. Some states actually used the net as a misinformation tool by putting harsh restrictions on what was allowed to be shown on it, as viewed from inside their own boarder, and off course, all states tried to present their own interests in the best possible light.

But the Net was far from dead.

It twitched.

The People

People will always find outlets for their needs, and the needs were strong at that time. As the net had became more and more restricted and regulated so had also the knowledge and cunning of them doing the needful, even if not necessarily legal, things for the Net. Among those was a mostly small splintercrew of hackers, crackers and artists. Primarily they were concerned with distributions of free knowledge, at least as in the sense of it becoming free knowledge. And as almost all computer freaks they has a fascination for science and fantasy, so they wanted in on the Aurora project.

One of them, Daniel, had taken on him the responsibility to keep a close check inside the Aurora database on a regular basis, looking without touching, after all, there was a hackers code. What they had decided to do was to create an informal and unofficial mirror for the whole project, just in case. Not that they expected anything, in theory it was supposed to be a global project, for the good of all humankind, but as they had this hacker rule " better safe than sorry " well, somebody had to do it, why not them. As the project Aurora project continued to develop, Daniel found some strange sightings in the Aurora9 database. There were those images that Aurora9 had made before its last jump coming back to Earth. Aurora9 had been programmed to first make twenty jumps in a continuos session, then it was expected to backtrack those same jumps towards Earth. As Aurora9 didn't get out at the exact same location backtracking as it had when going forward in the jump sequence and as there also would be changes made by time, one had to allow for relative motion. Everything seemed to level out while comparing star charts, radiation levels, audio etc, but just before that last jump to Earth something changed.

It was as if there was a disturbance somewhere, but when he took the image from the first jump from Earth and then compared it with the image from the jump back on his flat screen he couldn't find any dissimilarity. It was only when he stopped treating them as images and went down to the underlying composition of zeroes and ones, the actual source code that created the images that he found out why he had reacted. That last image had been manipulated, very skillfully, and only someone like Daniel with long understanding and knowledge of digital manipulation would have noticed anything strange. What was stranger still was that those images weren't even official ones for the Net, They were both restricted "for internal use only"? There seemed to be two possible explanations here Daniel thought. Either the image had been procured and changed after arriving here on Earth by some interest or other. If not, it would to have been changed when still in space. Daniel called for a conference with his group. Normally connecting through encrypted communications spliced over numerous nodes. This time though, Daniel insisted that everybody also should use "anonymizers" over the lines.

"Well, that should stir up some interest" he said to him self, smiling. As the conference finally went on Daniel presented his findings for the group,

-"Are you sure" asked Leo

-"I'm sure, but I'll send u all my sourcecode anyway, with annotations "answered Daniel

-"This is slick work said Thor, outstanding work my man".

-"Yeah, but where do we go from here people?"

-"Well wrote Lind, that depends on whom manipulating whom, right."

-"Ok", said Leo, "so I say that we put it out on the Net, - with source and all".

-"Maybe" wrote Lind. "We all know each other from the net, but that is as far as it goes with some of us. I try to keep it Compartmented, but I'll tell u cyberpunks. In my other community there hasn't been the slightest whisperings about faked evidence in the Aurora project."

-"Oh" said Daniel, slightly stunned. "-Civilian or military?"

-"Both" wrote Lind

-"Jesus Lind "said Leo. " Are you connected to them".

-"Well", wrote Lind. "-same same but different ; )"

-"Kind of a chock for me Lind" said Thor." We've been in business here for quite some time now. I don't fucking know you any more!" He complained.

-"As I said," wrote Lind somewhat smugly "-Compartmentalized, I wouldn't tell you this if I didn't trusted u guys. Bu u need to know now before u do something stupid, as putting it out on the net for all." " Let me off this little firecracker at my community first and see whom hides and what pops up"

-"We appreciate you warning us and all", said Daniel "-but as we're using 256 bits Zimmerman encryption all over, why would we have to worry?"

-" Zimmerman PGP is cool," wrote Lind, "-no backdoors that I know of. And no, I haven't tried to track u down guys. But I'm thinking that I surely would like to know why somebody is trying to wreak Aurora so, if u please, let me do my thing first."

-"It may give us a direction to follow" said Thor " but if you're right about the manipulation, no offence Daniel, and it isn't Earth at all, then who the hell is it?"

-"Ah" answered Daniel, "-no offence taken, ET:s?"

"So we leave it with Lind for now? "

-"She'll let us know as soon as he hears anything, right? "

-"Then if nobody has anything else to suggest, let's break for now" Daniel finished.

With that they called of the session.

While waiting for Lind popping her "firecrackers" in the intelligence-community Daniel started to go through all raw Source code he could download from the Aurora Project files. As he was a serious SF-buff he also went for the second of his theories. The one whereupon the manipulation had happened while Aurora9 still was in space. He wrote a short and dirty program loop which only purpose in life was comparing jump-points going out and coming back, looking for specific code patterns that matched the way the changes had been written in the manipulation-code he already found. All in all he fond seven certain manipulations and three more that he really couldn't be sure of.

Land Of Grey

On Lind's side the hunt were on.

Now, all agencies had safe nodes of communication, some official but mostly unofficial. Why unofficial nodes were considered more secure than an official secure node only a trained agent could explain, and he wouldn't. Let it suffice to say that Lind used every unofficial safe node she could and dared. Only when her whisperings came back to her in a slightly diffused version over the official safe nodes she considered her mission accomplished. Now she settled down to wait for reactions.

And reactions there were.

There certainly were. Among the first to react was the NSA with NATO and the Warsaw pact as a close second. Off course the EEC and its secret mastodon Echelon had to become involved. In the end only the remains of the once so glorious Hippie movement seemed to keep its distance from investigating "the conspiracy" against the Aurora Project. The First rumors centered on the Jihad movement. Mossad sources and the FBI both confirmed them with a strong suspicion of an Islamic involvement, and a threat level according to the FBI raising to but not overcoming four point nine. But then the French pointed their finger on ultra right groups purposely situated in the USA and Israel simultaneously. The Germans on their side found the silence of the eastern countries slightly unnerving and strongly recommended a more concentrated intelligence gathering inside the eastern block and their allies.

At the same time the English found new evidence of deeply buried "moles" inside their own security organizations and frankly hadn't the time to accuse anyone. The Russians kept their silence, but as they at the same time raised their contributions to the socialist regimes in Latin America and Cuba, the United States couldn't help but finding their motives highly suspicious. China accused nobody, but let it be subtly known that this was just what you could expect from the corrupted west. The Islamic countries had no real interest in the aurora project, except for that secret hope from some of her disciples that the 'Great Satan' finally would take its leave,

In the end the only thing anyone could agree on was that there seemed to have been some sort of digital manipulation of the Aurora9 findings, but as for who and when none could say for sure.

All in all it made Lind start leaning towards that second theory to.

When the group had it second meeting Daniel showed his new findings. Lind presented her observations and without going to deep into details explained that it was her belief that Aurora9 probably already had been compromised before entering the solar system. So now the group stood before a new problem, who could manipulate Aurora9 in space and why would the same manipulators allow her travelling home when they just as easily could have left her hanging in space as her 19 sister Ships probably was? At this same time things actually started to shape up for the Aurora Project. After the evidence of sabotage the western nations felt that they truly had to start moving on their colonization scheme before it all would be to late. The most expensive parts of the building of the Ships were already finished. There were functioning factories both on the moon and in orbits around the Earth. Waiting for being sent out towards the asteroid belts and meteoroids. Also to clean the Earth's sky from all that old space junk (and maybe one and another spy satellite to) that threatened both the MonoRail and the space shuttle's going up and down from Earth. The only thing missing now was some good old peeptalk for all them braves and their lovely spouses. All of which was expected to embark onwards the stars.

As usual the UN was ready to take on the responsibility for creating just the right Environment for the exodus. The first thing they did was to mount a committee. After some months of deliberation the committee hard pressed for time had created an ingenious resolution. Its essence came down to one point. A blueprint for how the involved states should set up their own committees.

In UN: s own immortal words, " In this way the language barrier will cease to exist as injun committees would be speaking injun, and the Innuit committees would be speaking Innuit ".

The Ship

The first starship started to take shape in its orbit around the moon. The expense of it was the biggest undertaking the UN ever had made. All the Industrialized Nations had to chip in, money seemed to flow as if there was no tomorrow, and maybe that was the truth to. As the ship never would have to go inside any gravity well, the 'would be architect' were free to make up any shape he liked. In fact the UN made a contest for inspired architects, and as the young winner got his praise he was also given the opportunity to proclaim himself a selfmade lover of Mother Nature.

The winning starship form became that of something similar to a hand with all fingers except the third closed into a loop. The fourth were bent into a bigger 'O', and with some good will one could say that it represented both the outermost finger and the thumb, all joined together in that timeless fashion of appreciation similar to them NASA daredevils once coined.

The famous - A-OK -

The reason for this particular form confided the architect was the possibilities it opened for docking with other starships inside the 'O'. And as the architect explained, it was because of the extreme preciseness of that very docking procedure that this third "finger" had to be so rigidly stretched out, as in defiance of the very universe. It was fast becoming a very popular tourist attraction for visiting school classes. And as one young boy from Luna City said, "he just couldn't wait to experience his first starship docking ". But for those wretched souls who never would get the pleasure of viewing that majestic sight, you ask? Well, at least they could simulate it using their hands folded in the appropriate way. The stardrive were situated at that point where the wrist would join the hand normally.

For how the starships drive worked, only a few enlightened could explain, In a very complicated but straightforward way it took a firm but subtle grip of spacetime. Wringed it upside down, folding it gently down, then ripped it open and drove through it at a furious pace. All of this taking place in the same moment as it stitched it back together behind its passage. Simultaneously in eleven dimensions, most even smaller than the Planck size. Explain that who can?

As for the old Wormhole theories they all predicted that wormholes would collapse the first time anybody tried to sneak in, and right they were, The new theory manipulated those dimensions that the old theory just had told to 'fuck of'. That was a very stupid thing for that old theory to do. It made the new theory extremely unwilling to come into existence. Only after much cajoling and flattering remarks about the symmetry and mathematical beauty of her by lots of nice looking, earnest young scientists did she appear. And then only to stay for that slight moment the nice looking sharp scientist, or as it may more often be, that fine looking ship might need her. Oh yes, one might also mention that the architect, who was a true admirer of the finer things, insisted on naming his first ship Ac-Dc. Both in memory of those timeless songs, and as a tribute to Spielbergs classic R2-D2.

Daniel and his group were as earlier implied in somewhat of a dilemma. Should they take what they believed to be the true story to the authorities? Or were there some other viable options open for them? As they soon found out, there was. The Ac-Dc was at last ready for its first light. Its engines had been primed, its nosecone polished to a high gloss. It gleamed as a, aah well, as a hand I suppose, with its third finger proudly erected against Earth...

After growing up within this inspiring sight for years, it came as no surprise to the architect, that a large number of those adolescents also wanted to follow it on its maiden voyage. But as the ship was, under strict terms from the UN, also an equal opportunity employer. It then also would have to gain an equal number of girls. And none under the legal age of sixteen could freely sign on for the journey, at least not without a leave from their parents. This problem of equal opportunity the architect solved in a truly innovative manner. He handpicked the first hundred boys for their looks and for their voice qualities. Then he made them out into twenty a'Capella boy groups, sent them out on a six months worldwide tour singing. And as they gained more and more popularity among the fairer sex he created ten 'Groupies Of The Year'. Teen Contests, one for each boy group, where in he promised the first thousand girls winning, that they would be able to sign up with said boygroups with a good chance of becoming 'The Groupie of the year'. To be totally honest there was something of a moral dilemma here, you just couldn't send out Earth's first starship with colonists only consisting of pubertual adolescents, no matter how enthusiastic they seemed to be.

As the ship easily could contain up to a five hundred thousand people the architect had decided on a maximum of forty thousand adolescents and one hundred and sixty thousand grown ups. That would allow ample room for births and such. The adolescents he already had, It was the grown ups that was missing. For the terran committees life wasn't so easy, Their governments were quite prepared to give them some time to get it all together, but they had been more cagey than one would expect from a bureaucracy. As it was there was almost nobody of enough seniority to be taken seriously in any of those committees. So the whip was on them. The poorer nations didn't really care, as far as they were concerned they were quite satisfied with letting the richer states coughing up the "lab-rats" for this colonization project. There had been twenty-one Ships sent out whereof only one had come back home, and that one had been sabotaged in the process. It just didn't feel safe.

So why not let someone else take the glory. If it worked out for this first starship, then maybe it would be worth a second chance, at least for that part of their population that had the opportunity and wealth. This was another limitation of this first star Ship, only people with at least twelve years of schooling or nine years with a degree in some practical profession would be considered for this first journey. That excluded most of the third world population. Those living there who had that degree of schooling almost invariably already had a comfortable living standard. Therefore they saw no real interest in turning themselves into living lab-rats competing from the lowest rung of the social ladder on the Ac-Dc. As usual those who most needed a chance were the least welcome, which only showed once more that intelligence and wisdom aren't necessarily meant to coexist. Nevertheless, the ship was getting filled. There were enough dissatisfied people for that. The major obstacle the committees saw weren't people, but the architect. For every step on the road he put new and ever more strange requests, restrictions and delays on an already hard ridden committees. The latest was a reserved quota of former Special Forces men and women, two thousand of them, one thousand engineering soldiers. And as if that wasn't enough, also five hundred sappers, five hundred logistic trained plus one thousand maintenance trained. And then there were quotas for faith, for the color of your skin, ad naseaum. Even if that could made a twisted kind of sense, there was also this preposterous way he had of insisting on personal interviews whenever it came to people above a certain level of class or knowledge. It slowed them down, it really did.

At last the final bunch of colonists were chosen, When they came up to the ship they were, as always, stunned by the shear size of her. They found that she was so big that she even had her own woods, not only parks but real woods. And lakes, and birds, in fact she seemed to be more of a Noaks ark than of a star Ship. As they had to make their own gravity on the ship it was constructed with double, triple and where it was possible even quadruple hulls. To keep them apart from each other the architect had juggled all kinds of technology from gigantic ball bearings to Supra conductive magnets. The only rule separating the rotation hulls were the height inside each one. At a minimum five hundred and fifty meters free space from top to bottom as one would experience it standing inside the rotating hull. It could make you dizzy, standing there looking up at a sky that rotated that fast, if you were in a two three or four-layer hull. But as we are creatures of habit everyone got used to it in time.

If one were inside the middle hull in a three-layer construction one would experience somewhat more than one G. And standing in the innermost hull rotating in the opposite direction from the middle. One would experience a somewhat lower G-force as a counter force balancing the inner hull. And the same for the outermost hull. For the one, two and four-layer hull the counterbalancing were somewhat easier of course. The whole ship was dynamically balanced so that all those movements took each other out. In fact, to balance all possible vectors in all possible ways had taken the engineers two years. And some three hundred and forty different scale model's to actually make it work. As a bonus of that exactitude, it was even possible to isolate and steer the G-force inside any of those hulls. Of course that would influence the other hulls to then, but by implementing chaos mathematics as far as possible one could spread the disturbances over the other rotations to a minimum while still experience a noticeable weight change inside that one specific hull.

The finished ship was so huge that you could see it as a shadow on the moon.

Here There May Be Thygers

So what had our little splinter crew been up to lately?

After some heated discussions they had finally and for the first time decided to meet. As Lind said, "oh shit, this is bad manna, real bad manna". But as far as they could see they really didn't have any choice. It was either that or to try to forget whatever they thought they knew. They saw each other for the first time at the cafe pigless, it was a rather big place at the outskirts of Stockholm. They had chosen it because ii was easily accessible by boat, subway or car. It still had very few cameras. Nowadays there seemed to be surveillance cameras everywhere, all for your safety. They choose to sit outside the cafe mostly because Lind wanted to lap some sun before the evening. Lind wasn't bad looking, Daniel thought. She had a rather nice smile, copper colored hair and those really big yellow sunglasses. "Definitely weird looking shades" said Thor smiling at her. "So that's what you want people to remember about you, then?" Thor was the oldest guy in the group, an undeterminable forty, stocky built a rather laid-back looking guy. She smiled right back at him, " right Thor that's what I want you to remember". "That's cool with me" said Leo looking appreciatively on Lind. "But people, we have things to decide here. And I have this strange feeling that we're running out of time". Leo was in his twenties, a little on the chubby side, with a somewhat nervous but energetic expression. "Yeah, I think you're right" said Daniel "we need to move on this info now, before Ac-Dc ships out for her maiden voyage". " I've been calling in some favors," said Lind. "As far as I've understood it there is not a lot we can do, really. It seems that the 'powers that be' already are informed on the situation. They are sending it out any way". "That could be a death sentence." Thor said. "Do you have any idea why they are going through with this?"