An Open Letter of Apology
September 5, 2087
To everyone and everything known to humankind, I’d like to say I’m sorry. Had I known the consequences of my actions, I never would have shared my invention with the world. While history will likely judge me no better than the men and women who developed weapons of mass destruction, or the war-loving leaders of nations long gone, I’d like to think that my gifts allowed the human race to go farther than ever before.
This is a small comfort considering what actually happened. If anyone is reading this, I am truly sorry for sharing the Near-Cee Engine.
When I started work on the project 15 years ago, it was supposed to offer us a means to easily visit space and reach other planets. There were so many of us on Earth back then, and we needed a cheap and effective way to get into space to collect resources and build new homes for ourselves. With the discovery of a habitable planet twice the size of the Earth only 8 light-years away, how could we ignore the opportunity to go out and explore, as well as reduce the population burden on our home world?
Twelve years ago the prototype was finished, and I made a successful run from the Gobi Desert to the Moon and back in under an hour. After a quick systems check, I took the prototype back up and made the round-trip to Venus with two others. Six hours later, we were back on the Earth in time for dinner.
The engine was a success! We could now quickly travel to worlds that were once weeks away. The scientific colonies on the Moon, Mars and within the asteroid belt could now receive more supplies and assistance should the need arise. The cost of a flight to and from Mars would now be less than a day’s wage, and private space craft with a range of half the solar system could be built for under a million dollars.
It was an exciting time.
Two years after the prototype successes, the governments of thirteen nations had sent massive colony ships to New Earth. Seven-hundred million people were packed into the incredible vessels with enough food and water for the trip, and enough raw materials to quickly build shelters on the virgin world. We had no idea at the time if the planet was already populated, or if there was plant an animal life. All we knew were the basics.
New Earth was twice the size of our planet, with roughly 60% of the surface covered in oceans of liquid water. The colonists should be arriving at the world in another two years, and it will be another eight before a message is received by the satellites orbiting the Earth regarding the viability of the planet. Because these colony ships are traveling at 0.8 times light-speed, the inhabitants will have only aged 4 months for the 12 years in transit.
As the years went by, and as private craft became cheaper, more ventured out to this new world. The internet was buzzing with excitement about the potential of the fresh planet. The colony ships had barely entered interstellar space before the Boeing website was inundated with millions of visits and requests for private craft.
Then, just like teenagers who were finally permitted to drive a car without parental supervision, we started going all over the solar system. Treasure hunters flew to Titan in an effort to recover the Cassini and Huygens probes. Some went to Mars in order to collect the Pathfinder and Viking robots. Others went farther still, trying to cash in by finding and selling the probes that we had sent out before us. Most of these items were auctioned off before the tomb raiders returned to Earth. Despite government and public condemnation of the act, these priceless tools of science were snatched up from their resting places and sold to the highest bidder like the treasures usurped from the Egyptian tombs centuries ago.
But this was to be expected. What wasn’t expected, though, was part of a mineral sample returned from Eris … one of the larger Trans-Neptunian Objects on the outskirts of our solar system.
A private cargo vessel was returning from a research station in the Kuiper Belt and decided to take a closer look at Eris, a dwarf planet slightly larger than Pluto. They happened to see something shining on the surface and went in closer for a look, only to find a metal that appeared to be reflecting much more light than could be attributed by the Sun. It looked like gold and had an internal glow. A new word had to be created to describe the beauty of the material, and double as its name: kayamic.
The solar system’s best scientists examined the material and discovered that a 1 kilogram brick of the material contained enough energy to power the Earth for five years. Considering how we were 18-billion strong in 2082, the kayamic material was a remarkable solution to the constant power problems all over the system. To make matters more interesting, it was discovered that Eris contained enough kayamic to keep the human race fully powered for the next ten thousand years!
But the incredible benefits of kayamic didn’t stop there.
The Near-Cee Engine had a maximum theoretical velocity of 0.85 times the speed of light. In order to achieve and maintain that speed, the NCE would need to receive 89 Kilowatts of electricity per hour. However, to travel at 0.80 times the speed of light, the NCE required only 7 Kilowatts. This is due to the change in the laws of quantum physics when objects are moving at a velocity greater than 0.83 times that of light. With the introduction of kayamic, 0.85 was no longer a theoretical speed.
Less than six months after the introduction of kayamic to our spacecraft, the geniuses at Mars’ Hawking University worked out a way to integrate this exotic material into the NCE in order to achieve speeds in excess of 0.95 times the speed of light. It seemed that Einstein’s speed limit was about to be tested!
But then something happened. We were getting sick.
At first it was limited to the people that were in constant proximity of kayamic. But then it spread to people who had never even been to space. The first symptoms included exhaustion and joint pains. This was followed by a loss of appetite, zero sex drive and a feeling of boredom.
Then last year it came to a head … there weren’t any babies born. Not just human babies … but livestock, wild animals, birds, fish and insects. Species were dying off in seasons, rather than centuries.
This is when people started to get scared. Rumors started circulating that this disease had come from Venus. Efforts to start colonies on the greenhouse-happy planet had been in full effect for almost twenty years. The planet was already used to produce 40% of the genetically modified grain consumed in the solar system and, as the Nature First groups often do, they blamed the sickness on something they hated. But this wasn’t the cause.
Entire families started buying private spacecraft with the ultra-fast Near-Cee Engines to get as far away from the contamination as possible. Most went towards New Earth, others decided to try other directions, regardless of whether viable planets had been discovered. It wasn’t until a month ago that we discovered the true cause of the disease.
My Near-Cee Engine.
It’s long been known that viruses exposed to extra-terrestrial environments became much more viral in short spans of time. To combat this, doctors on Earth had discovered that a person with a small amount of digraphite in their blood stream could actually kill viruses while also remaining perfectly healthy. Digraphite is most commonly used to cure AIDS and various forms of cancer, but it also works incredibly well when used to convert humans into virus-scrubbers.
The problem here is that when digraphite is accelerated to near-light speed, it begins to react differently. This allowed previously harmless viruses to infect humans and attach to the altered digraphite molecules. Once a few viruses started adapting themselves to the miracle molecule, they learned to feed on it. To make matters worse, the virus was airborne and undetectable until a few months ago. It’s been circulating throughout the solar system for almost two years, now. Every oxygen system has been contaminated, and there is no known cure.
As of today, 98% of all livestock, animals and insects across the solar system have died. The Earth’s oceans are full of dead creatures, and every shore is rank with the stench of death. Billions are starving because there is not enough farmland in the entire solar system to feed us. Food has become so scarce that humans are resorting to cannibalism in some places.
And my engine is to blame.
The people en route to New Earth are due to arrive in another two years. Infected people that have fled in the same direction will arrive in just a few more later. While the inhabitants of New Earth will not have the disease at first, they will most certainly get it once the first sick refugees start arriving. We’ve already sent word about the problem and advised the colony to shoot down any vessel that approaches, but the New Earth colony doesn’t have the firepower to take down every spacecraft that will arrive, nor do they have the military capabilities to constantly protect their skies.
Eventually the human population in this solar system will balance with our food production. Billions will lose their life beforehand, and our home planet will never be the same. Some even speculate that with the complete absence of all live other than human, the world will die. I, for one, would rather not think about such a terrible thing.
Every doctor and scientist available is working around the clock to find a way to combat this virus. We humans still have a few decades to find an escape for extinction. I’m doing my part by taking as many people as possible aboard the new generation of colony ships. These vessels are capable of 0.995 times the speed of light, which would make two days on the ship the equivalent of one year on Earth. We have only enough food to survive for four months relative ship time, so I’ll hope that a defense can be found in the next 60 years for Earth.
I would hate to think that every form of life known to man died from an indirect result of my invention.
- Jeff Albright
Creator of the Near-Cee Engine