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  NEW EARTH: ARC

  Devon C Ford

  Copyright © Devon C Ford 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2018

  Cover by Claire Wood

  ISBN: 978-1-910780-99-2

  www.vulpine-press.com

  Dedicated to H who fought hard to win the world record in worst sickness during pregnancy and excused everything with the claim of ‘growing a human.’

  Author’s Note

  I recently read a review which slated a good friend’s book as being “a total work of fiction.”

  It was a fiction book, a totally constructed story that, whilst based on real science and potential events, was in its essence just a story.

  This is what writers do; we make stuff up and people can choose to read it. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it isn’t, but it does exactly what it claims to do: it tells a story.

  I say this at the beginning of this book by way of an apology. I’m no rocket scientist, and I’m no geneticist, but I am a story teller. So please, if my calculations of Earth’s orbital patterns aren’t quite up to astro-physicist levels, or maybe (no spoilers) I’ve created in my mind something that couldn’t actually exist within the laws of science that we know, then I ask that you let it go…

  It reminds me once of an argument I had whilst watching a film about dinosaurs being brought back to life. The argument was about the type of weapon used not correlating to the bullet hole in the glass it left and raged for quite some time until we were both brought up on it. The question was simply put: “Why are you two arguing about guns, but not the fact that dinosaurs are there?”

  That shut me up.

  So please, read the story, and take it for what it is.

  ;)

  Prologue

  Deep Earth Orbit

  January 19, 2033

  I took my last look at Earth through the window, or hopefully Earth as I knew it anyway, feeling almost numb for the knowledge of what was going to happen.

  “Annie?” I said aloud, hearing the soft, muted tone of acknowledgement hum from the speakers in each section to signify that my creation was listening. “Exact time until impact?”

  Her synthesized voice filled the small, round corridor I was floating in. “Time until impact is nineteen hours, thirty-seven minutes and eight seconds, with a variant threshold of forty-nine seconds. Recommend you begin cryoprocedures within six hours, Dr. Anderson.”

  “Thank you, may as well do it now,” I said absently, treating Annie politely as I always did, like she was a person who was concerned for my feelings instead of what she truly was: an integrated computer interface operating system usefully informing me of a forty-nine second margin for error.

  Placing a hand on the glass and almost covering the little blue and green orb I was born, raised, and lived on, I said my final goodbyes in silence. I turned to propel my body horizontally toward the access to the upper corridor of the ARC, or Ark as we’d quickly decided to pronounce it all those years ago, when it was still the International Space Station. I’d been on board for eighteen months, and although fully acclimated to the environment, I doubted I would ever really get used to it.

  I’d intentionally taken a specific route to get my last view of the planet we were all born on. The return route to my assigned cryopod took me past almost everyone else aboard, which was just about everyone as the only remaining people awake were the two maintenance specialists who would be reminded to rotate every twelve months by Annie. They would go into cryo for six months to cover the impact and the aftermath, then Annie would wake them to take their turns as the custodians of humanity.

  Rank after rank of white tubes looking like torpedoes lined the chambers, all of which could be individually sealed in the event of anything catastrophic happening, and the ARC as a whole could be preserved with minimal losses. All of that was controlled by Annie, following her in-depth internal flowcharts of decision making which had taken me close to fifteen years to develop. The new subroutines for her to follow and enact accounted for almost a decade of that, when she was repurposed to be the caretaker of the human race.

  On arriving at my assigned pod, I spun myself around lazily, allowing the zero gravity to do most of the work, and settled myself in to the soft straps.

  “I’m ready, Annie,” I said out loud as the pod began to flash a sequence of lights denoting the cryotube was starting up, then placed the breathing mask over my face and needlessly adjusted the tracker device on my left wrist. I saw no sense in waiting or delaying it, as it wasn’t as though I could stay up late to watch the big show.

  “Commencing cryosleep now,” came Annie’s soothing tones, making me feel grateful for the year and a half I’d spent working on finding the right voice for her program. “Goodnight, David. Sleep well.”

  With that, I closed my eyes and breathed in the subtle combination of gasses that would put me under before my body was frozen into a state of hibernation.

  So long, Earth, I thought to myself, see you in a hundred years.

  Part 1:

  Pre-Event Earth

  Chapter 1

  Mumbai

  May 25, 2021

  As international billionaire entrepreneurs went, Amir Weatherby was young when he rose to the head of the family business. Their portfolio was so diverse that not one single person in the organization knew what fingers were in what pies, and there was a chief executive for each continent, often ones for individual countries depending on the concentration of assets and investments. The company, Icarus Investments, was so vast that it was everywhere and nowhere. They paid taxes to no country, and any organization that went after them for revenue ended up losing.

  Amir, educated at all the right establishments and spending his time between his mother’s family in her native India and his father’s multiple estates in the US, was the epitome of the entitled elite. He appeared as a rich Saudi oil prince, spoke like he grew up on the upper east side of Manhattan, but was equally at home walking the sweltering, packed streets of the Indian capital.

  Nothing was beyond his grasp; everything had a price that he could easily afford, and he always got what he wanted. Despite that privileged elitism, he was a likeable, charismatic young man.

  The company was responsible for the first self-driving cars, for the automated drone delivery systems active in some major cities, for technological breakthroughs in ballistic body armor, as well as the armor-piercing munitions capable of defeating it. They sold indiscriminately to the entire world, albeit through a series of blind companies so no direct scandal could ever taint the company name.

  When he turned twenty-four, he used his newly gained law degree to advise the best team of lawyers in the Netherlands in a case that was watched eagerly all over the world. The government was suing Icarus for millions in taxes for parts of the assets operating in their territory, and a win would reverberate over the globe and set a precedent for everyone to follow suit.

  Amir’s father, Paul Weatherby, had taken steps to negate any losses and moved all of their European assets into a dozen other companies which would take years to follow, but Amir was confident of winning the case in court.

  When they did win, th
e counter-suit he levelled at the federally collective twelve provinces of the Netherlands threatened to bankrupt the country. If not for the intervention of the European Union and a number of behind-closed-doors concessions made to company limitations, then they would have been finished.

  Two years later, after losing Weatherby Senior to a sudden and unexpected heart attack, Amir calmly put on a ten-thousand-dollar suit and gave a heartfelt press release to the world on the sad passing of a great man. A visionary. Within six months, Amir had reassigned the majority of assets into research and development with an undisguised view toward commercial space travel. The privatization of government assets was an ongoing trend throughout the entire west, whereas the Russian and Chinese continents were becoming increasingly insular. Amir had acquired entire launch stations in former Soviet Union countries, had doubled the wages and conditions of anyone working at NASA or their sister organization of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, and invested so heavily in the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, that he found himself in the unique position of being able to influence the country’s policy priorities if not directly dictate their mandates. He even managed to privatize the running of the ISS, International Space Station, after the Chinese and Russians withdrew their personnel and funding from the program, leaving a financial vacuum which begged to be filled.

  One of his biggest gambles was the acquisition of the Hubble telescope program, which was suffering with the reduction in investment from all the space-capable nations. This gamble ultimately paid off as, when it was being repositioned for full-time Mars reconnaissance, the operators saw the asteroid.

  2021QX84 was what they had called it and Amir thought that was stupid. The report came with a warning that the trajectory of the asteroid would take it past Earth, at least inside the solar system, but nothing more accurate could be said at that time. He knew that dozens of such warnings came each year, and each year world-devastating hunks of rock and mineral and ice passed through their solar system without causing the panic that such knowledge would inevitably bring.

  Leaning back in his chair and frowning at the screen bearing the ambiguous report, he picked up his cell phone and dialed the number for the first rocket scientist he had ever met. It was picked up inside of three rings, and the person on the other end sounded sleepy.

  “I’m sorry, Ian,” he said as he made the lightning-fast calculations in his head to tell him that he had just called someone at a little past four in the morning, their time, “I didn’t think before I dialed. I have ju—”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” came the voice from the other end. “I haven’t left work since yesterday.”

  That made Amir sit up, as though he now saw the seriousness of the report that had been sat in his inbox. Ian Edwards was not a man prone to panic. Having spent much of his life working long hours for NASA at Two Independence Square in D.C. instead of at home with his wife and two sons, he had jumped at the chance for a better life in a warmer climate working for Amir. The fact that he was still at work spoke volumes.

  “Is it this 2021QX thing?” Amir asked him, holding his breath for the three-second pause on the other end to pass.

  “Yes,” Edwards confirmed worryingly, “our supercomputers have run the simulation twice now, and are running a third. It doesn’t look good,” he intoned ominously.

  “What kind of ‘not good’?” Amir responded as he rose from his desk to pace the large office. Edwards paused on the other end of the line again.

  “Ian?” Amir prompted.

  “It’s …” he began, sounding unsure, “it’s going to hit us, we think, depending on the gravitational pull of the sun as it passes through our solar system.”

  Amir said nothing, letting the phone drop away from his ear slightly before Edwards’ voice brought him back.

  “Yes, I’m here, go on,” he said.

  “I was saying that it’s not certain, but we could be looking at the big one. A dinosaur-killing sized event, only bigger …” He trailed away, waiting for some answer, some childlike hope of reassurance to come from his employer and benefactor. Instead he heard the coldness of the response.

  “Who else knows about this?” Amir asked.

  “Me and a handful here,” he said. “Three people working on the Hubble and that’s it. The Hubble people sent it down to us, but they do that with four or five a month. Usually we can tell within an hour that whatever asteroid they’ve found will pass us safely by millions of miles away, but this one—”

  “I want total lockdown,” Amir interrupted him, “no media, nobody who doesn’t already know can find out, and no government report.”

  “We have to tell the govern—” Edwards began explaining, reminding Amir of their contractual obligations when acquiring the Hubble, that every contact report had to be sent to NASA for analysis.

  “Give them a different report,” Amir cut in again, knowing full-well what his obligations were, “just don’t tell them that it will hit us. Don’t even hint at it. Let them think it will pass by.” He paused as he shot his cuff to look at the Omega on his wrist. “I’ll be there in around … seventeen hours.” And with that, he ended the call and dialed another number.

  “I need a jet ready for takeoff in half an hour,” he ordered into the phone, “with enough fuel to get to Texas.”

  ~

  At the other end of the terminated call, Ian Edwards looked at the cell phone in his hand for a moment.

  Have I just been ordered to lie to the government about an asteroid that will hit the earth? he asked himself, then considered what would happen if he didn’t. He looked at the initial calculations, measuring size and speed of the space missile and accounting for variables in the trajectory, and knew with absolute certainty that this thing would wipe out Earth if it hit them. Then he looked at the impact predictions, his eyes resting on one thing and staying there.

  It’ll take nearly twelve years to get here, he thought, what would we do to each other in twelve years when there are no consequences?

  Deciding against being personally responsible for worldwide anarchy, he took the report to his desk, adjusted his seat, swallowed hard, and typed out a new version to send to his former colleagues at NASA.

  Chapter 2

  Research Facility in Estonia

  November 30, 2021

  I guess I was a bit of a loner even before. I had been at the company’s research facility in the Estonian countryside for a little over two years after my project had been picked up and funded by Amir Weatherby’s company. My invention had been used all over the world before this, but my previous bad contract meant that nobody knew it was mine, and I didn’t have access to the profits for it to be developed. I was a genius and an idiot all at once. I knew that actors and singers needed agents to stop them getting screwed over, but for a robotics geek from Massachusetts with a pair of degrees in robotic engineering and computer linguistic programming, which I earned at the same time I might add, before blasting through my doctorate, I was just a dumb kid who got played by the big corporation.

  My reluctance to jump straight back in bed with another big business after I earned less than half a percent of my last invention’s net worth was pretty obvious, like a recent wound. But when a guy lands a helicopter literally on your front lawn to invite you personally to work for him at a state-of-the-art facility, it kind of impresses.

  So that’s what I did. I packed up all my things into storage, gave notice to my landlord, and I left. The decision to leave the States was an easy one, having no family left inside of a comfortable drive and nobody around that I really spoke to anyway.

  Hell, I was so wrapped up in my shoestring project that I didn’t even have time for a cat.

  There were other people working at the facility too, so it wasn’t as though I spent my entire life only talking to Annie, or to give her proper title, Advanced Non-Sentient Intelligence Interface, or ANII for short.

  Annie was an evolution of my first invention. Hav
ing a voice-controlled computer doing things like playing your music and adding detergent to your shopping list was cute and all, but I wanted more from her than the average soccer mom did. I had just finished wasting a huge amount of time on refining the right voice for her, and had been given clearance for her to be integrated into the facility’s control system to help with the running and to test it for efficiency. The original plan was to hardwire speakers and microphones into every room and corridor, but someone from high up in the company arrived with a list of questions for me from Amir.

  Could the ANII be programmed to operate a series of systems without human control? Sure.

  Could the ANII operate for extended periods without human interaction? Sure she could, it’s not like she has feelings.

  Could the ANII run multiple systems and diagnostics at once, in different locations, for extended periods? Given enough memory, sure she could.

  “Hey, what’s all this about?” I asked the guy as he was tapping away at his phone with the answers. Jabbing his thumb at the screen of the smartphone, which was designed, manufactured, and retailed by the company, naturally, he cursed as he couldn’t get the signal for the message to go out.

  “You need to connect to our system down here,” I told him. Seeing his look as he was about to ask for the network password I cut him off. “I got this,” I told him, then tapped at my own tablet to connect to Annie. She wasn’t hardwired into the facility yet, but she was connected to the computer controls.

  “Annie?” I said, then listened for the muted beep from the tablet speaker which told me she was listening. “Can you connect my friend’s phone here to the network?” A two-tone beep sounded to tell me she understood the question before the speaker on the guy’s cell phone came to life.