The First Warp Drive - Chapter 1

The First Warp Drive

                Most people of my time remember where they were when the first Superluminal flight took place.  Many even remember when the first public demonstration of the engine that would finally free us from the bonds of normal space.  But few know the real story behind how it all actually happened.

             I’ll spare you the suspense.  Not only do I remember those first tests, but I even remember the epiphany that finally circumvented Einstein’s Laws of Relativity themselves.  Not that anybody else would’ve wanted to be there.  You see, I was sitting on the toilet when it happened.

                As I sat there on the toilet, waiting for my body’s unusually slow waste removal system to perform its duty, I would think.  I would stare at the tiles on the wall, imagining the grid before me was some kind of farmland far below, or perhaps the cross section of a giant starship, even though starships of the time were not built that way.

                The epiphany in question occurred as I idly tugged on the toilet paper beside me.  I was fifteen years old at the time, and I noticed that as I stretched the paper in one direction, parallel ripples would materialize in the paper between the two anchor points.  I had long known that space was stretchy, but it was at that moment that I realized that if one stretched space in one direction, it would tend to narrow in the second, and form ripples reaching into the third, out of the original plane of the paper.

                Since space is three dimensional, those ripples would form in the fourth, unseen dimension.  In my day, we had cracked the problem on tugging space itself.  But, we’d never taken advantage of that ripple effect.  Nor had most laypersons ever really cognized the fact that matter itself was merely a persistent distortion in space.  The world felt too solid for anybody but theorists to seriously believe that everything we intuitively knew about matter was simply an elaborate illusion.

                Now, it’s time to provide some background story. 

                I was born on a poor, barely habitable planet, creatively named RD-515c, orbiting a ruddy red dwarf star in the outer reaches of the gap between the Perseus Arm and the Orion-Sagittarius spur in which Earth resides.  Our name for our planet was enticingly named “Godiva”, but that was where the attraction ended.  It orbited well outside the habitable zone for the star, which isn’t terribly surprising, considering the habitable zone was a puny 0.2 A.U. wide and so close to the star any planet there would’ve had its rotation gravitationally locked to its orbit around the star itself.

                Not that that would’ve been such a bad thing.  At least, we might have been able to walk outside on a warm day.  No, we lived in a miserable collection of semi-submerged domes, two to three kilometers in diameter, connected through tunnels in the ice and rock.  Thirty million of us lived there, and from what I gathered, that number had barely changed in the three centuries since the colony had been established.  I’m not the first person in my colony to wish he could travel backward in time and wrap my fingers around the neck of those first colonists and demand to know what the hell they were thinking.

But, in Province 15, or Coventry Lane (oh, these names!) as it was officially designated, solitude for study was apparently their greatest desire.  No consideration for a comfortable living, or even any kind of financial reward.  This region of space consisted of mostly aged Population II and Population III stars.  Few rocky planets, practically no mining income to speak of, which much of the Human Federation used as a means to generate wealth.  Our Province consisted of more than twenty planets, scattered across nearly a million cubic light-years of space.  A trip from one end to the other would take our fastest ships two centuries. 

                About the only thing our colony had to boast about was its Science and Engineering Universities.  Our graduates often developed the latest and greatest new weapons and ships, but because they were usually working for one of the richer governments, ours remained poor and undeveloped.  In fact, by the time I happened upon the scene, our government often pleaded and bribed the best Engineers to remain behind and try to build our faltering economy.  But, they were working against human nature.  They just couldn’t afford the huge salaries or hire the best lawyers to defend their patents.  You could stay and work for us, only to see your greatest ideas stolen without compensation, or get a pittance and a pat on the back for your good work.

                But, there was growing resentment against the richer provinces.  They treated us like third class citizens, bullying our government into providing even more concessions and benefits based upon empty promises and unfulfilled contracts.  

                For over a thousand years, humanity had ventured among the stars, slowly spreading outward.  Planets with single-celled life were relatively common – found in roughly one of every ten stars.  But, it was the larger biota that turned out to be exceedingly rare.  Early estimates of the Drake Equation assumed that complex multi-celled organisms would occur in a sizeable fraction, perhaps even most, of all planets with life.  But, instead, the figures were shockingly low – less than one in a thousand such planets had been found in twelve centuries and a million stars of searching.

                And forget intelligent life.  The smartest extra-terrestrial intelligence located was roughly on par with Earth’s birds of prey.  They knew a rodent when they saw it, but they were a long, long ways from self-awareness.  Or creating a civilization, or manufacturing, or spaceflight.

                So, so far, it was a Human Milky Way Galaxy.  Centuries of listening with huge radio telescopes had turned up nothing local, just some indecipherable babble from the Triangulum Galaxy, some 2.8 million light-years distant.  As Scientists pointed out, those broadcasts originated 2.8 million years ago, so they could be a lot more advanced.  Perhaps they were even on their way here.  But it might take a while longer.  Even at 95% light speed, it would be another 140,000 years before they arrived.

                Despite our propensity for building warships, our society was mostly peaceful.  Sure, there was the occasional bickering and a few bullyings and threats, but large scale interstellar war had never occurred.  The distances and time scales just made it not worth the bother.  Humans now inhabited somewhere around two thousand planets, with average populations of a few billion in core systems, and a few tens of millions in developing colonies.  Demographers figured there were between five and six hundred billion people scattered among all the planets.  So, it was a reasonably safe bet that we’d be around for a while longer.

                Technological growth had slowed from the heady days of the first expansion into space.  It’s not that everything that could be invented had been.  Not by a long shot.  But, we already lived vastly longer lifespans than our forebears, typically three to five centuries, and usually it was sheer boredom and nihilism that brought lives to an end these days.  Not a lot of people really had the appetite or ambition to go on living for a whole lot longer.  Those who did often became almost insectoid, locked into a narrow cycle of eating, sleeping, and working, enjoying simplistic, repetitive entertainments.

                Even in the poor, metal starved worlds of Coventry Lane, food was plentiful and lives were long.  Many individuals on my home world seemed satisfied to spend their days just reading, learning, and accumulating huge libraries of knowledge.  It just wasn’t very comfortable.  Travel was less common, and the large interstellar yachts favored by the rich in the core systems were practically unheard of.

                So, if I were normal (which I wasn’t), I could look forward to an erudite life in a small subterranean cabin, with the occasional longing glance up at the admittedly spectacularly bright glow of the Milky Way galaxy spiral arm overhead.  We were fairly high in the disk, so could look out over much of the galaxy unhindered by interstellar gas that choked much of Earth’s view.

                Earth.  I had never been there.  Neither had most of my cohorts.  Indeed, I had yet to meet a single person who had even seen our species’ origin up close.  The planet had been seriously damaged by the Industrial Era and beginning of expansion, but some last ditch efforts had saved it from complete extinction and were a long way towards nursing the planet back to health.  Few native populations remained, so it had become somewhat of a park, even a curiosity, to the past few generations.  But, it was expensive, and required permits to visit.  People from my province were not exactly welcome.

                Besides, it would've taken five centuries to reach it.  A trip there and back and pretty much everybody I'd ever known would be long gone.  Despite this lament, it wasn't my motive for creating a warp drive.  At the time, it just seemed like an interesting problem to solve, and perhaps a way to personal wealth.  Yeah, I won't try to delude you.  Despite my humble beginnings, I'm as greedy as the next guy.