75 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
75 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
Message Incoming...
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Source Melchizedek.0294
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Approach β Hyi
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Ascension 00h 25m 45.07036s
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Declination –77° 15′ 15.2860″
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Distance 24.33ly
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Equinox J2000.0 SOL
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Year 3781, QEC adjusted
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[Autotranslator enabled...]
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Jerome Somerset Pasani, Warrant Master
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:::
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Hämäläinen has been pestering me to address our time dilation
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versus what RS001 is reporting back. If our transmissions are
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accurate we seem to be logging messages from the mid 25th century.
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In fact, several relay messages predate our own ship's launch.
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Temporal mechanics is bread & butter to space travel, and I'm sure
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all of you out there are intimately familiar with the various
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methods of stellar travel and the havoc they cause with calendars,
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but RS001 logs for posterity and--I'm told--is analyzed by school
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children in some systems. For that sake, I'll take the advice of
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my navigator and try to explain exactly "when" we are.
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The first thing to understand is that Mechizedek is a variable
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speed craft, with a slow steady acceleration and deceleration. If
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you blend all those speeds together and look at the average, we've
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been making our way to β Hyi at roughly 1.875% light speed. With
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no other adjustments, that explains our 1,297 year voyage (Sol
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POV). Of course that's not the whole story. Our Peterse 773s
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generate our thrust through gravity shelling & sheering that our
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primary school audience will know from the frozen egg experiment.
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Thanks to the intense gravity shell, our ship's space-time is
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isolated and slowed relative to outer space. The Peterse 773
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Overtreffen holds internal time at a fixed 1 miller (1 light year
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per year) despite changes due to acceleration. Finally, thanks to
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distance dilation, we only needed to travel 24.32 light years
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instead of the full 24.33! It might not seem like much, but for
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those of us living in the cold and dark, three days fewer are very
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welcome.
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Our cryogenic systems had us asleep for almost the full journey
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while the Melchizedek kept us healthy and built up supplies to be
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automatically dehydrated or frozen themselves. (To Tim Fletcher,
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Chief Engineer of the Garnet Star, our botany bays are built with
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auto-harvesters and processors.) Our food supply generated over
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the course of the trip, even adjusting for the unknown state of
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the forward crops, will keep the settlement well fed for three
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generations while the terraforming does its work. Unfortunately
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for the five light sleepers aboard, the equipment to reprocess the
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food stores is not designed to be used in transit. I can't
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complain too much, though. Prezzi Adeyemi has worked some sorcery
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with the rations which she calls "salt" (That's a joke, kids).
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One final note regarding our logs. While we are confident that in
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normal space it is EY 3181, our gravity shell isolated our QEC
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transmission node from normal space-time in a unique way that was
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not accounted for in trial runs. It seems no one else has worked
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with gravity shell drives over such distances and time debts
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before to notice the offset. Our logs are transmitting as if we
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had only travelled 24 years, effectively into the past.
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In fitting with Sansom's Clause, "Any effective time travel is
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immediately made irrelevant by its own nature," our distance from
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Earth means that any insight we gain through observation will have
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traveled so far as to be insignificant to the past audience we
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could inform. Even so, the crew is excited to be numbered amongst
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those logged on RS001 with confirmed cases of chronology
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displacements. Apparently there's a button or patch we get to wear
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now, once manufacturing is back online.
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Back to duties.
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.
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