Keller

"I think I talk like a ventriloquist dummy. My lips don't move, but words come out of my mouth. It was some 17 days since the we'd heard from Keller. Some two days since we sent them a message."

Message interrupt. Cutting and pasting a sketch from years ago. Followed with a pic of some notes as to how the emerging "EM Drive" could be applied to the logistical mechanics. Followed with some discussion of story viability.

[Intra-Station Keller

His whole world had existed in a capsule of stars and steel.  Blake was born on earth and had traveled to Keller Station with his parents at the age of three. 

Space faring, at least within the solar system, was common by 2150.  The New Expansion, as it was called, had seen millions streaming outward from the earth.  The Belt was growing by the year.  The moon colony had, by the late twenty-first century, become a political force to be reckoned with.  And now, way stations like the Keller were being established throughout the empty expanses between the planets themselves.  Like merchant towns along the railroads of the old American West, these stations served as supply depots, communication and transport hubs.  But unlike the old railroad towns, the Intra-Station repeatedly looped back on each other.  The experience for a traveler from one end of the station to the next was that of how people used to catch connecting flights at the long gone ‘airports’ of earth.  A station’s orbit would eventually ‘meet’ first the preceding station and then the succeeding station after enough time and space had passed.  The stations may not have actually seen each other in this ‘meeting,’ but over time they did approach close enough that a shuttle could cross the distance between them in a matter of months, if not weeks.  The angular velocity of the Intra-Stations was far greater than the planets of the solar system, so that one could travel, hoping from one station to the next, from the Ort Cloud to Mars, in twenty years.  The Intra-Stations, as they become known, followed regular orbits around Sol as the planets did.  Spaced evenly along crazy trips from Mars to Jupiter, Jupiter to Saturn, then to Neptune, and finally, to Pluto and the distant ice-mining camps in the Ort Cloud. 

The Intra-Stations’ inhabitants were in constant flux.  No one stayed too long at the station.  Everyone was en route to elsewhere, either up the well, or back down it, usually back down to earth.  Generational shift changes flowed through these stations.  A husband and wife would work half their lives in the hydrogen processing plant orbiting Jupiter, and then return, passing through the Intra-Stations, to birth their children (usually born all at once, via multiple, simultaneous test-tube births).  The ‘new’ family would spend twenty years raising their children on the stations, a year here, seven years there, and so on, until they reached their next locale of employment.  Then, after the children had grown, worked in one of the great domes of the asteroid belt mining silicate for some 50 years, meanwhile burying their parents there, they would reverse the migration upwards from Sol to another occupation.  And so Mankind had become a fully solar species, living in almost all corners of this series of revolving bodies we call home, this constant oscillation of energy and mass we call the system of Sol.  Few lived on Earth anymore.  The tolls of evolution having wrought our old home finally uninhabitable.  Humans lived near the other planets now.  There were no more sunrises, or sunsets, no more seasons.  Rather people spoke of the Shifts.  They would say their parents were born during Jupiter Shift, and such information would suffice to describe how the following generations would live.  Mars Shift, Belt Shift, Jupiter Shift, Sat-Nep Shift, and finally the Ort Shift.  One would think people would just stay where they were:  work, raising their families, and die in the same place.  But the creators of the Intra-Station system had anticipated trouble if people were to be allowed to adapt to their single locale, their single Shift.  The creators anticipated civil wars, racism, all the destructive forces which took their toll on Earth.  The creators wanted to act on the lessons of old Earth.  They knew the people of Sol would have to be homogenized on a continual basis.  They worked at one place or another, and by custom, moved to a wholly different place at the midpoint of their lives.  Raising the next generation as they traveled.  And so no class or geographic differences emerged, nor the conflicts that came with such differences.  Every generation was born in one place, employed doing one thing, and then the next generation would start all over again in a different place.  The whole of Mankind shuffling itself between the planets.  All people had the experience of growing up on the Intra-Stations.  In a way, the Intra-Stations were the nurseries and cemeteries of the solar system.  But the creators overlooked a significant part of the human psyche, that of developing specific cultures through oral tradition as it is passed down through the generations of a family, or a tightly knit group of families.  The creators had overlooked the formations of clans. 

The clans emerged in the Sol system soon after the complete abandonment of Old Earth.  It was a way for people to hold onto a cultural center, to preserve their lingering ethnic identities.  And as you may imagine, with the formation of clans, soon followed the feuds.  Blood feuds developed over centuries.  Each clan declaring the repercussions loudly.  For every clan knew when it would encounter its rival, that is, when the two clans would meet during a shift change.  And in some particularly nasty incidents, a shuttle would arrive at a station after a trip of years, and within days that station would be dead, the inhabitants having slaughtered one another, leaving only the stained walls, and decaying parts and pools of what had been thousands of human beings.

The Cycles

The Feuds

The Beginning and the end of Both]

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/emdrive-news-rumors/

https://www.thrillist.com/tech/transit-times-to-planets-how-long-would-it-take-to-get-to-mars

https://theplanets.org/distances-between-planets/

Where did the idea for this story come from? It's rather too far in the past to know (I prefer to remember things up to only 10 years ago. That rule excludes all history before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which must be retained in its entirety for viewing of Jeopardy! and games of trivial pursuit). But it can be imagined the story stems from a recognition of man's basic violent, tribal nature. And reaches for a structure of civilization that could control the violence.  And yet of course, ultimately fails at that goal. Cause stories need drama. We need drama. This is known.

The implications of the EM Drive are profound. Testing in orbit is coming soon, reportedly. But the speed of travel may be of less importance than the society's dictum that travel must occur on a regular and planned cycle.

Other questions:

• How does this enforced migration affect the nature of man and his social linkage?
• What is the effect of disconnecting people from an allegiance to place?
• What alternate allegiance moves in to fill that vacuum?
• (Why does vacuum have so damn many "u"s? Something should rush in and fill that shit.) 
• Why is everything double-spaced now?

From the viewpoint of writing this concept up in a short story, it should be pointed out that not every question must be answered. Details need to be plausible, but need not be exacting. I spend each summer catching up on my subscription to ANALOG: Fact and Fiction. That's a lot of short stories to cover, and it has given me an appreciation of how the short story is constructed.  Space Station Keller may have a future.  We'll see.

In future posts, I should bring back out into the light of this blog of self mumbling and peer review, my old project of MYLI (multi yield lobe implant). It's a story who's reality is still coming, in a future where the "phones" as we still call them, are finally nestled firmly inside our skulls.

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