The Solitary Warrior, Part 1

Filed Under Creative Writing, Science Fiction

A Short Story by EZPowell

Hyderabad, India, April 10th, 2010

Was there an Armageddon of mankind? Had the world as we know it been destroyed? Had hordes of nuclear weapons embraced the globe in firestorms and nuclear winter? Had Yosemite exploded in an unexpected rage of molten rock and lava bombs, hiding the sun from the starving billions? Had the seas been thrown asunder from the darkness of the depths of the abyssal plains by a crashing comet traveling at over 100,000 mph, washing billions of tons of water over entire continents, smashing everything man had built over countless millennia?

No! None of this had happened. Something much sillier had gone wrong, or perhaps, gone right.

Some smart-Alec computer scientist in scruffy Levis with a gross ineptitude to interpersonal communication had discovered something. Actually, he hadn’t discovered something so much as he found something. And how had he found it? By surfing the web, of course. And then one day he decided to make a change, for better or worse. His ultimate goal was to be a womanizing soldier of fortune, with more than a little bit of excitement and spice added to his life. Over time he made himself into a solitary warrior. Not bad for a complete and total geek he somtimes thought with a smile.

The hacker was once a gregarious, fun-loving boy who had delighted in running around his neighborhood knocking on front doors and running away. Some of the doors he knocked on were ignored; some were opened and their occupants smiled for they knew the boy was only a humorist. Some of the doors opened emitting annoyed angry people; one was particularly nasty and threw things at the boy, like newspapers and golf clubs but the boy ran fast.
One particular afternoon the nasty old Scrooge behind the door got the better of the boy and caught the young rogue sneaking up to the door. The owner of the house was not behind the door but hiding in the bushes with a hosepipe. He spun the tap as the boy neared the door, about to knock. It was mid-winter and cold outside. The boy was soaked and ran home in a shivering cold state.

The boy would never be the same from that day on as he vowed revenge. Over the next three years, until the boy left for a distant boarding school, the Scrooge behind the front door never got another mischievous knock on his door. The boy never got hosed down again but the Scrooge did have a liking for rather delicate perspex red and white mailboxes.
The mailbox was the type with a horizontal slot for letters on the front, and a nice neat round hole for newspapers. About once every twelve months the mailbox would be replaced with yet another bright shiny new perspex mailbox. The boy the Scrooge inside the house had so spitefully hosed down had taken a liking to large dynamite shaped fireworks that he stole from a corner store. Every year when the fireworks were on sale the boy would steal exactly seven, winding them together with paper tape in a perfect hexagon, tying the fuses just right so that all seven thunder crackers exploded at once. So once a year the shiny perspex mailbox received a special package that blew pieces of the mailbox all over the Scrooge’s garden. And the boy would always think as he was fleeing the scene of the crime – “‘So much for vengeance being mine,’, saith the Lord.”

The boy grew into a teenager. Unfortunately for him when he got hairs in an unexpected place he also got bright red spots all over his face. His gregarious days were over and he became a shy and withdrawn young man. Even though he was now very much terrified of women and how much they could hurt him he still had his intelligence, his patience and his natural willingness to do the utmost to help. This was apart from certain Scrooges with mailboxes and other occasional abusers, whom he never ceased to summarily destroy. However, at his age and with his knowledge and technical skills he was unlikely to indulge in something as primitive and barbaric as fireworks in their mailboxes – but then again, why not?

The playful and gregarious naughty boy had grown, discovered girls and found them to be scornful of his spotty red face, and had withdrawn to his toys. Now he was a smart-Alec computer scientist, with scruffy Levis and a gross ineptitude to interpersonal communication. However, he had discovered something, or at least found something, more or less by piecing tidbits of information together from the Internet. In short, he had discovered something monumental not really by discovering it but by putting together lots of little pieces known by a lot of very intelligent people. The issue all those intelligent people had not covered was putting all the pieces together.

At the time of the discovery a countless number of scientists and researchers throughout the world were researching various things. Many of those projects were secret–the secrets of many nations, large and small, powerful and weak. The point is any hacker worth his salt with the patience of the very bored or the very lonely, can find anything out.
Over a number of months of constant nightly vigils and quite often without sleep for over twenty four hours, a nondescript, spotty-faced, untraceable hacker discovered, or should we say, pieced together, the most significant discovery of man’s time on earth. Well, perhaps the wheel was more important and perhaps writing but these were inventions rather than discoveries. There is a subtle difference.

Scientists had been finding planets, gas giants and small rocky things that probably were simply just that: rocky things. Bluish planets with clouds and skies, and magnetic fields, and Jupiter sized planets scooping up Schoemaker-Levy impressionists all were somewhat in short supply in our local galactic neighborhood. However, there were a few very intriguing prospects that long-range, spaced-based arrays of telescopes had found, analyzed, and assessed as very likely to be habitable. (“Habitable” is a relative term but generally when assessed by computers built by humans it is the human race under discussion, not big shiny alien monster bugs.)
Of course, there could be anything there. These worlds could be barren, dry, hot, cold, or even full of life. Even with no radio wave emanations and thus no intelligent life forms, it was always possible these planets were crawling with life. Those forms of life could be deadly bacteria and microbes for which man had no defenses. However, those forms of life could also be large, hairy, or perhaps even smooth. No matter the complexion of alien forms of life, especially the non-sentient, unintelligent ones, they could prove to be just as deadly as any unexpected aggressive and intelligent bug-eyed monsters with ears on stalks and their genitals up their left nostrils. Non-sentient rows and rows of very sharp teeth are always a prospect. And who said they should even have genitals?

Of course, people didn’t think about things like rows of nasty teeth. And if they did it was immaterial. So what did our hacker discover? No, he didn’t find any planets, or strange bacteria, or even things with teeth. Over a period of time, including of course those many sleepless nights, he managed to find a way for people to get to these rocky blue, supposedly friendly skied, cloudy, habitable alien worlds. And so he pieced it all together, and much to the chagrin of various competing governments, he announced his find to the world in general, as many a scientist would love to be able to do but never gets around to actually doing. You see, the hacker was a hacker, and a good one at that. He never left a trail, no matter where he went. Whatever he found he either memorized or distributed into a voluminous number of places in cyberspace only he knew how to find. After all, years of sitting in his creaking chair drinking cold coffee and staring out his window had placed many slots into his overloaded psyche. Nursing his loneliness and his zits had given him plenty of time to memorize a million and one different things (most of them nonsensical, but never mind that). Sitting at his computer screen he often wondered what girls were really like, apart from the ones he talked with online. No matter how naked or excited those online ladies were it still wasn’t real. Never mind, he thought. Was that the root of his problem–girls? Or was he was just lazy?

So let’s get back to the topic at hand. The hacker found a way to make interstellar space travel possible, and to transport huge loads, across the blackness of space between the stars. The secret was an engine, or various engines really, combined to be one for various stages of travel. Since there were already profitable mining operations on the Moon, Mars, and dotted throughout the asteroid belt, obtaining resources for building huge space ships was not really an issue. The question he asked himself upon his discovery was this, though: What government in its right mind would want its population to know that it was possible to transport hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of people to new worlds? Would governments revel at losing most of their populations? Well, different types of governments might send different types of people. Some would want to send their best and some might surmise that space travel could get rid of some undesirable, perhaps even subversive elements – the people who didn’t agree with their incumbent governments. That is, the types of people that some undemocratic governments might deem to be unpatriotic!

The truth be told, the earth was sick, sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold. Global warming had begun to take its toll. There were wild storms everywhere. Most of South Florida in the United States was rendered uninhabitable by violent hurricanes, the likes of which the world had never seen. Many other low-lying areas throughout the world were now underwater, their cities sometimes walled in and circled by huge pumping facilities to keep the water out of yet another ancient but now suddenly below sea level metropolis. The fate of even Gotham City, the city of all cities, hung in the balance for a reason never to have been expected. Occasionally there were devastating floods and even some of the largest cities were still being abandoned to the rising and oftentimes raging seas.

So there were worlds out there that people could go to, both the adventurous and the desperate, and sometimes even the unwanted. And now there was even a cheap way to get there such that all needs could be met, in terms of a power source, fuel sources and space-faring shipbuilding materials. Governments should be worried. There were wonderful new worlds to go to. Both the very best and perhaps the very worst would leave, the former voluntarily and the latter sometimes coercively and even forcibly. And that is just what happened. There was a brain drain of human skills and know how from all points of the globe. It took twenty-five years and it cost the earth most of its productive, useful, and hard-working population, even if some of the more despotic governments did manage to remove their more subversive subjects. If ever the Earth were vulnerable to communism this would be it. All that was left were those who neither had the determination to succeed nor the gall to protest at those who did and refused to share. The only result was a slow economic collapse and a general disintegration of nations into smaller nations and sometimes even city states. In short, a complete loss of central control, and thus central checks and balances, and most irrevocably so it seemed, a partial break down of the very pillars of modern civilization.

The colonists on the shiny new space ships had all gone. Most of them were in cryo-sleep, some not to wake for perhaps hundreds of years. Most were unlikely to be heard from again. Some never even made it past a bunch of rocks called the Oort Cloud; some others not even past another bunch of rocks called the Kuiper Belt. The ships were constructed in a tearing great hurry by the sheer force of human will for mass exodus from a dying and used-up planet. The colonists sought escape and adventure. Unfortunately, many ships built by poorer, and even some larger and less caring nations, failed to build defenses against things like flying comets and bits of rock, and even small things just hanging around in space. These bits of rock and comets sometimes got in the way of the newly built fast-moving ships. Some ships suffered from small holes that more often than not expanded explosively into big holes. Believe it or not small holes can quite happily become really big holes when made between the really huge pressure difference of one atmosphere and the vacuum of space. Some of the newly built, fast moving, big space ships simply hit other big things. In these cases both big things disintegrated into a fiery nothingness in less than a moment, and, of course, being in deep space, with no sound for anyone to hear.
Well, nobody did hear, not even a scream. Not even the occasional crunch and screeching of wrenching metal and that fancy new carbon fiber stuff everybody raves about. A simple, primitive radar might have helped, of course. Some budget cut or other made an informed but ultimately shortsighted decision. radar waves can only be belted out and back at the speed of light. With these shiny new ships moving at quite a clip, radar was considered pointless. By the time the radar reflections returned to the ship, that very ship might well have been already at, if not already past, the point of impact, namely the thing that the radar was supposed to enlighten the pilots about. Unfortunately, making a broad-side turn was likely to be too slow. And going off course at such a speed would make them irretrievably lost, notwithstanding yet another conservative budget cutter’s savings on fuel costs. Of course, the pilots would have to be paying attention and not be drunk on the job, or whatever else it is that pilots are doing when they drive things like great big space ships into things, such as rocks and things. The bureaucratic budgeter may well have been correct of course but still, radar might have helped even just a little. And at least those awake and running the ship could have woken everyone up for a really swell party or something like that. Some ships had telescopes. Most of the passengers were in a deep sleep. The only crewmembers awake, as I already said, were probably drunk with boredom to the point of insanity. So there wasn’t anyone spending too much time looking through those shipboard telescopes, or even looking out the front window for matter, even if there was a front window. The results were frequent spaceship to errant flying rock collisions. The resulting aforementioned muted bangs, screams and disintegrations have already been described so we shall not revisit to the point of loitering.

Even with many accidents a multitude of ships with their precious colonial human cargo made it into interstellar space unscathed. So what is interstellar space you ask? Interstellar implies between stellar things. Those stellar things are the stars, stellar meaning star, in our case The Sun or just Sol. Supposedly the vast tracts of unclaimed real estate between the stars are empty and filled with nothingness, apart from perhaps some dark matter here and there. Well supposedly it’s all empty nothingness. Whatever is in interstellar space is of course irrelevant because man was now in it. Forgive me for I digress once more. So, man was finally unleashed upon the galaxy, with varying measures of success.
In the coming millennia God might have a lot to answer for, and perhaps for a multifarious quantity of reasons. Was man being unleashed upon the galaxy actually something that God had planned on?
“Perhaps not,” you might ponder aloud. After all, man has made quite a mess of the earth already. Do you think he could do better next time? “And who is this God person anyway?” I quote Douglas Adams. And how come they keep changing the age of the earth every time some dude like Darwin comes up with a new theory? Like for instance how come there are people on Earth who still think the earth is 6,000 years old? And even that dude Charles Darwin died centuries ago. Perhaps people are happier in a state of delusion? Perhaps we should all join them in ignorance, then we would no longer have to think about all this complicated stuff!
Is ignorance actually bliss and therefore the meaning of life itself? Perhaps it is not the meek who shall inherit the earth but merely the ignorant?
And is that not therefore bliss and thus happiness?
Perhaps. Perhaps not, but who cares anyway?