Geography 4: Sealine

Sealine is a rock floating in the darkness, in the middle of nowhere. One thousand years ago it was supposed to became one of the most interesting places in the galaxy, in the next few centuries. It never happened, or, to be more precise, this bright future was delayed until now.

Closest inhabited settlement is about 100 years back, in the fastest possible way to travel. Which is how we arrived here, but consumes too much energy to be viable for regular exploration missions. We are at year 2340 of Expansion Age, and this part of the Galaxy is still a remote place. The line between us and Solar System is thin and long, while most the exploration effort is spreading from the Sun in a dense net.

Things are like that because there was huge motivation back in the last centuries of Baby Steps Age to reach the next stop in this direction. Mystery System.

This is the only place in the know Universe where the laws of physics don’t seem to apply. Or at least something extraordinary is making our readings of this stelar system fluctuate in an uncanny way. Arousing curiosity of all scientists.

Competition for a place in the Colonizing Fleet to Mystery System was ferocious as nothing else we ever saw. It was the largest fleet ever build, and the investment in laser-roads and frontal shields to speed its way was extraordinary. Even with that, it was a travel of 1200 years. With the Consensus of Alexandria dictating the limit for human life in 300 years was clear that most members of the effort would not reach destination.

I am one of the exceptions.

Since Baby Steps days was stablished that no one would be asked to give up biological immortality. The limit would apply only to those born after the law start being valid.

Was implicitly understood that, as a general rule, the limited opportunities in Expansion Missions would stay reserved for those who had limited lifespan. Either because they had been born after the Consensus or because they had chosen to give up their endless longevity.

I got my place despite of that, with a few million others like me. In part, tanks to corruption. In part, thanks to having rare knowledge that seemed important at the time.

Each step in the way, where a group was left behind to stablish a colony, we “long-lived” folk where among the first recruited to stay behind. It was only fair to allow those who had shorter lives to live the opportunity to reach closer to the destination.

Was selfish of me, but I managed to stay in the mission until almost reach destination.

I was born hundreds of years before the Hearth of Humanity start being build. Was part of the team responsible for design the first “Guardian AIs” conceptual core. That gave me the chance to stablish a close relationship with many ships AIs, and kept me going almost all the way to Mystery System.

Finally, I was caught by a human Etic Board. In a hundred trillion ships, each one with billions of cabins, they decided that they had no place for me.

I was left in this rock, 93% ice, to help build Sealine.

Ironically, that frustration saved my life. Since the Expansion Fleet to Mystery System was destroyed by some undocumented phenomenon short after enter the stellar system of Mystery Star.

Sealine is isolated, but it is not a bad place to live, really.

All colonies are supposed to decide for themselves what sort of govern they will have. Which laws and moral codes they will follow. Within the very ample parameters of Alexandria Consensus. We where a few hundred thousand at the time, and little more than 50 thousand of us where long-lived people, like me. A good portion of them even older than I am.

We made the creation of talking beings who are not human illegal, from start. To close the door for what was developing as slavery in many parts of galaxy. The influence of many people who grew up before the Consensus was essential to achieve that step.

There was communists and national socialist ideologues among the founders of Sealine, but in the end a sort of soft Welfare State prevailed. With decent ground for freedom of enterprise, sharing space with universal health-care and education provided by govern.

Now we are close to one billion individuals. Separatist movements are endemic in different sectors, but up to this moment unity is enduring. With some higher levels of autonomy being granted to sectors where tensions escalated to **** too often in the recent 400 years.

All humans in the know Universe still live by the Consensus. Longevity remains limited to 300 years. And those who want to live longer than that must give up their status of people and became property (in the places where that is no completely illegal, places that are not like here in that particular).

I no longer work with AIs. They have grow beyond the need for human support long time ago. I still count some AIs as personal friends, and must admit that is not too different to be friend of our slaves. In fact, those are slaves with quasi divine powers, somewhat like the djinns of Arabic mythology; but still, in some sense, they are slaves. Not of individual humans, nor even of governs, but slaves of humanity as it is defined by Alexandria.

We should be the periphery of Mystery System. Grow with the arrival of scientific missions and tourists. Share the glory of those pioneers who first studied the puzzle of Mystery System in person.

Instead, we are the last step in this ghost road. The place from where humanity observes the darkness of a mystery to dangerous to be studied from any closer.

We send drones to investigate, try to figure out what happened with all those ships. What killed all those people. If any survivors could be rescued. Up to this day, we found nothing more than what we knew when contact was lost.

I now own a bed and breakfast pension at Seagull-Rock. A Surface Village of 300 families on top of an ice mountain, where a few tourists came to be alone with the dark sky and meditate, mostly.

There is a launching station for exploratory drones in one direction, and the base of a Space-Port practically never used in the opposite direction. Our village gets visitors from the Mystery Monitoring Post and from the skeleton crew at the space-port. However, most people how came here are from the rotating cylinders build inside Sealine.

The cylinders are where most the Sealiners live. They rotate to create earthlike gravity, have forests, farms, some small mountains and large lakes, most people born there never fells the need to see outside. Children like to know what low gravity is like, but there are funnier places to explore that closer to home. The surface is for those few weird minds inclined to poetry and/or clinical depression.

I suppose I am in that group now. A worse case than most, since I live isolated on top of a hill, even in this isolated settlement of odd spirits.

Everything is white ice around here, or the darkness above. We can see Mystery Star from the top of my pension, close to the horizon. But that is little more than a dot, and is by far the brightest star on our sky.

Some nights I think I can hear the voices of those quadrillions of souls who died in Mystery System, trying penetrate the secrets of that unique place. Almost.

(Sealine is a block of rock an ice, with negligible atmosphere, just outside Lira System. “Big” and “small” are terms that may lose all meaning when we deal with Astronomic scale. It is bigger than any other thing nearby, and big enough to be called “home” by some. Still, tiny if compared with Earth natural satellite, our dear Moon.

For our story it becomes worth mentioning because it is the last stop before Mystery System, the name those outside the System still use to refer what we know as Lira System.

Here the human civilization involved in the Expansion Age ends. “Beyond that point there are monsters”, maps could say. From the point of view of anyone outside Lira System, what is beyond that point in the direction of that star remains a mystery)