The Past Residuary

How does space affect your speck, the outside world, does it intimidate you?

There is not an iota of doubt that the infinite stretch of flat universe is

magnificent. Flat, yes the universe is flat as we all know. Some would say that it is

a blessing to go into space, as only a select few are able to achieve this glorious

feat, I say it is not! You may very well doubt my intelligence, but what else do you

expect from a guy who spent more than Two hundred years in space!

Yes you read that right, two hundred and twelve years exactly, to be precise. You

may wonder how this ballad of two centuries came into existence.

It all began with a light stutter in the space; over the horizon of the Mercury. It

was quite visible via a telescope. It was an Einstein-Rosen bridge, what we call as

a "worm hole" in common tongue. Hawking-I it was named. Worm holes come

into existence after the fabric of space is distorted.

The year was 2048-july-22nd; something caught the eye of the scientists on the

'Deep Space Gateway', a space station that was launched by the NASA and the

ROSCOSMOS. The scientist had been studying the sudden change in the fusion

process of the sun. The sun had all of a sudden been giving out a higher amount

of infrared and UV radiations. The scientists were puzzled until they observed the

blue-black anomaly. No one knew what other place this hole led into. It was first

time that a bridge of this kind was actually observed. How did it actually form?

Was the atypical output of the sun a reason of its birth? I think not, the worm

holes need gigantic heat waves to puncture hole into time-space but sun, it was

inept of doing the same. What created that worm hole? We did not yet know.

Many people actually proposed Newton's ether theory, wherein they said that

the radiations caused the ether to misform. Though it was an absurd conclusion in

our modern time but nothing was ruled out. Or maybe you might have heard

about dark matter! What forms the blackness of the space? It is the dark matter

that contains the nothingness of the space. Think of dark matter as the medium in

which our earth revolves. Many a theories evolved and finalized that dark matter

had somehow been deformed and formed an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Scientists

claim that 96%-97% of the universe is actually dark matter.

Yet there were other theories that proposed distortion to time-space. Time space

as we knew was a really new field and here was something that wasn't

understandable completely.

You may yet not understand what an Einstein-Rosen bridge is, but think of it as a

glitch that connects two far-away places. By far-away I mean billions of miles

apart maybe. And maybe connects galaxies, or parallel universes. All our known

knowledge of the quasars, pulsars and what not was limited and here lay a portal

to the deepest secrets of the universe! About 70% of our very own planet was still

unexplored and here we were making plans to explore the unknown!

I was then working as a test pilot with the NASA's aircrafts division. I had made a

name for myself for I was the only certified guy who had approvals from the air-

force to the commercial companies. That rough and tough guy on your block!

That's me. Well honestly I don't have much memory about the recent events of

my life, but I do remember the car accident that i met in 2045 May, I was in coma

for a long time, for the longest time I have memory of! When did I get better? I

don't know. What happened after the accident, I don't remember and yet here I

was standing in the conference room of the NASA's JPL lab, Pasadena.

How did I get involved into this schema? It was quite me from the start; the day

the worm hole was discovered there was a hell of a delight running through the

entire world, for the worm hole opened the opportunities not just for the people

of science, but the 'space rodeos' too. Back in my time there were "space

festivals", what we called as the 'Rodeos'. During that time we would have space

races, space visits by commoners and planet visits too. Like you ought to pay a

million dollars and that was enough for a two days visit to moon!

The first Rodeo was started by the Space-X in 2044, four years prior to the

discovery of the Hawking-I.

The worlds bustle erupted when at 0900hrs GMT that day it was announced that

the NASA was going to send an unmanned probe into the worm hole. I was happy

too for we had reclaimed our planet over past few years, there were no wars and

peace prevailed, we had green energy, healthcare was available to all, UN was a

universal phenomenon and what not.

The only thing we lagged in was science. In all the commotion of winning back the

planet, the discoveries and inventions somehow were suffering the burnt.

After the great announcement by the Secretary General of the UN, a grand meet

of all the bests we had was called to engage into the course of learning. The next

day I joined a high profile meeting of the scientist and engineers who were to

finalize the draft and design of the probe to be sent into the worm hole. The

meeting was organized at the Kennedy space center Florida and was headed by

Mr. Bernard Clark, the best scientist, world had then. It began with finalizing the

design. The design team came up with highest form of capable proposals that

would shield the probe from the sun and guaranteed maximum equipment

carrying proficiencies too, but foremost it had to save itself from the extra

radiation coming out of the sun lately. Proposals of hafnium and tungsten

carbide, reinforced carbon, LI-900 silica and carbon shields as they used for the

Parker probe back in 2018 as probable substances were made.

Two weeks it took the design team, until they formally acquiesced a final proposal

that was Okayed by the ROS first. The ROS or the 'Remote Operation Sense' was

the AI (Artificial Intelligence) robot that was equipped by the NASA. Artificial

intelligence was a veracity of living. It was present everywhere. Even the mobile

phones were equipped with AI. The ROS of NASA was much advanced of all; it was

one of the marvels of the man but not a completely man made marvel. Partly the

ROS developed itself. With every click the ROS learnt new things and redesigned

itself into a super intelligent tendon of gravitas. The design that was approved

was one of a kind.

Now a bigger challenge of tracing the path and convoluting the components as

per the trajectory of the probe was facing us. Here is when the scientists cost me

my two hundred years.

Whenever an unmanned mission is launched, the trajectory in general is planned

out in advance, maybe even years before. You see, the path up to mercury was

easily traceable, in fact we could even predict mercury's position in a hundred

years, accurate by up to two meters in free space. Even though steering an

unmanned spacecraft was much into the equation but the path of this unmanned

mission could not be completed by the artificial intelligence bots or remote

steering, for it needed the classiest maneuvers. You may yet doubt the people

back then but that is how far the human intelligence was then.

The worm hole appeared over the mercury and was aligned to the gravitational

pull of it. Mercury controlled it. The wormhole was located not 60 miles above the

surface of mercury, in the northern hemisphere just above T-Galactic plateau.

How long it had been there? That was very well unknown. Mercury as we know

was created by the collision of two planets; we theorized that below its rocky

surface was the abundance of iron which caused a dwarf planet as itself to have

gravity much high as compared to its size. Talk about its temperature variations,

they varied in the range of -175°C to 430°C!

What were the maneuvers you may ask? It was to be a stall turn, what you may

call a "Hammerhead turn". None of the auto pilots could deliver it, it had to be a

hand of Homo-Sapiens. There was no artificial intelligence brave enough to rake

in the task of probe delivery. The trajectory at the point of deliverance was not a

job to be comprehended by some robot; it had to have a manual touch.

Now where our problem lay was that the worm hole was constantly changing

positions within the mercury's influence. Its position was ±1000 meters at any

instant. In a hammerhead turn you can visualize a rectangle, you travel the base

length and go up the width perpendicularly, deliver the payload and return via the

same track. Here the wormhole's change was seen to be independent of any

factors surrounding it. What caused this change was yet unknown. To complete

the hammerhead maneuver if we sent in a robot that would take coxswaining

orders from the earth, then the robot would have had to wait for sixteen minutes.

In eight minutes, the signal would be received by earth and another eight it would

be processed and sent back by when the wormhole would have possibly already

changed its position. Now any AI then wasn't able to analyze the current positions

and override and complete the maneuver, for technology as they say is unreliable.

Clearly we had not any artificial intelligence wise enough to complete the chore

of. So what resort we found? A pilot, possibly the best ever, to travel a 77million

kilometers and deliver the probe into the wormhole and return back!

We are humans after all, what could possibly go wrong?