Pretend that it is beautiful. There were some modifications made to its basic structure. Two large pods were attached to the rear end which carried the fully assembled space tugs (MINIMCOM!) along with other hard-to-synthesize equipment. The containers themselves were designed to be split into two half-cylinders and one was used as the entry dock to airlock to the Algol. Once their mission was complete, the Algol would fly home in its regular configuration. Since I can't do it justice graphically, here is the last time Rei sees it, thinking it is Rome piloting the starship home:
Rei felt the ground shaking beneath him. At first, he thought it was another moonquake. He turned and looked back at the station. Off to his right, rising majestically above the rounded pyramid of the star-base was the Algol, pounding the dirt, whipping up the dust with its powerful EG lifters. The starship flew forward then executed a slow bank right until it came around and headed in his direction. He never realized how gigantic it was. The Algol was nearly half the length of the Ark II, but was much more graceful with huge thruster pods poised at the end of each airfoil. As it flew over his head, it waggled its wings. Rei raised his hand to acknowledge the gesture then stood by helplessly as it rose up into the air. After a short time, he saw it ignite the plasma thrusters and take off straight up. He watched it with tears once again welling up in his eyes as it became a tiny speck in the sky and then disappeared.
Is this the last time we see this magnificent starship? Maybe not. I am toying with the idea of bringing Commander Ursay back for a guest appearance in the upcoming novel The Milk Run and if I proceed, it will be aboard the Algol.
Entry 1-341: December 1, 2013
All Pastees Must Die!
In a previous post entitled Genuine Time Travel, I explained why it might be possible some day that real time travel will be invented. But whether it comes true or not, the only restriction will be you cannot travel into your past. That is why there are no time travelers wandering around our world so far. Quite simply time travel has not been invented yet. We'll exclude observational time travel which is an integral part of the Rome's Revolution universe. At the end of that article, I explained that should time travel ever be invented, the people of future will adopt the rule that All Pastees (people from the past) must die! Today, I thought I'd explain a little bit more as to why this must be true.
Let's think of time as a series of infinite threads stretching into the future. Each of these threads represents a possible timeline. Think of the present as a ring through which these threads feed into. Once they emerge on the other side (the past), they are woven into an immutable cloth (string theory anybody?) which is frozen and cannot be changed.
So, you invent time travel. You decide to go into the future (you cannot go into the past) and follow one of the possible timelines forward. You get to the future, experience it and then come back to the past. You cannot go beyond even a micro-second from when you left. You can only return to your "present." By its very definition, that timeline that you just visited must wink out of existence before it is converted into the past because when you left, you had never been there and when you come back, you had. So of all possible timelines, that is the ONLY one that could never happen so it winks out of existence.
Say you are a resident of the future and somebody comes up to you and says, hi, I'm from the past. As long as they stay committed to remaining with you, there is no issue. You just need to wait until the "ring of the present" catches up to you and your timeline is committed to the immutable past. No problem. But what if the person was just there to get stock tips or horse race winners? If they go back to the past, you die. You don't just die, you never existed. There may be a semi-infinite number of alternate timelines where someone who looks very much like you still exists but the one thing that is guaranteed is that YOU will not exist.
So what are your choices? Just let the person go back into the past? That is suicide with no body to be discovered. The only other choice is to kill the time traveler so they cannot go back into the past. It isn't murder. It's self-defense. If you've ever seen the movie Looper, this is the exact opposite. In that movie, everybody who came FROM the future had to die.
Bottom line: if time travel is ever invented and you decide to travel forward in time, don’t tell anybody you are from the past!