Cosmic Void - Chapter 1: Setting the Stage

Within the next few hundred years mankind will enter an age of unfathomable technological capabilities. Despite the fact that all nations on Earth will be consolidated into a one world government referred to as the Federal Commonwealth of Earth (FCE), the human race will be more polarized than ever before. A constant battle is fought between those who wish to constrain this new found technological liberty and those who wish to exploit it to the point of total anarchy. Holograms, quantum computers, artificial intelligence, virtually free energy, instant communication, brain enhancing computer chips, these are just some of the technological marvels which will become available.

However, there are many technologies which will not be made available to the public sector. Although they will exist, some technologies will be highly regulated and any person found in possession of these technologies is subject to severe punishment. These forbidden technologies include such things as teleportation devices and warp drive propulsion mechanisms. These devices pose a large problem for the establishment because they allow people and items such as narcotics or weapons to travel quickly across large distances virtually undetected. Of course that doesn't stop criminals from using this technology.

Although none of the exceptionally alarming technologies existed at the time of the FCE's formation, the rapid development of nano-technology in the 2040's and the appearance of practical hologram technology in 2053 (the same year the FCE was formed) led the new world government to enact pre-emptive schemes aimed at combating dangerous and disruptive technologies. Just 12 years after it was formed the FCE started to tag all humans with identification bio-chips. Then two years after that, in 2067, the FCE implemented a mandatory vaccination scheme and a program which required all children to attend a certified educational institution.

Then in 2071 the R&D department of the FCE developed technology capable of reading human brain waves from a distance. They started incorporating these "mind scanners" into public surveillance systems in order to monitor the mental state of all Earth citizens. Self aware machines, also known as strong AI, emerged in 2094 and the FCE used them to watch over us all. The AI will have access to the data from all the mind scanning devices and if it detects any "malicious intent" or a "disturbed state of mind" it will send the bio-chip ID number of that person to the police and the person would be tracked down and taken in for "rehabilitation".

By 2099 our knowledge of human biology and genetics will be so advanced that we have the ability to remove all defects and abnormalities from children before they are even born. This also includes mental problems such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder. The resulting children will be "model citizens" as far as the FCE was concerned. They are perfect conformists and hardly ever question the system they were born into because the mental capacity to question it has been removed from them at birth. The only people capable of posing a threat to the FCE are those born before 2099.

The FCE enacted child birth limits in 2080 due to an exploding world population, but even so, when the colonization of the solar system began in 2120 a huge number people born before 2099 were still alive. A great deal of them would leave Earth and eventually form their own societies on Mars which were free from the control of the FCE. The children born into these societies were not genetically modified and they avoided the totalitarian techniques used by the FCE. They would outlaw mind scanning technology on the basis that "thought crimes" were not crimes and they refused to tag people with bio-chips as if they were cattle.

The formation of the FCE can be traced back to a devastating war, often referred to as WWII, which started in 2044 and ended in 2053. When the dust settled the people of world cringed at the thought of more war, so when the military alliances of the time suggested that they could prevent all future wars by unifying under a common federation and absorbing the nations that had lost the war, there was very little resistance from those who feared a one world government. The propaganda of the time portrayed it as the natural progression of the human race, a unification of our species to achieve a state of perfect harmony.

One good thing did come from the creation of the FCE however. In 2062, almost a decade after the FCE emerged, the world was shaken to the core with news of E.T. disclosure. However, this news did not come in the form of alien visitations, the information was leaked out from official FCE sources. Apparently merging all the confidential intelligence of all the worlds nations isn't as easy as it seems. Although the world was now aware of the extraterrestrial visitations, the human species was still generally ignored by the ET's themselves. Having a single unified world government still wasn't enough to gain acknowledgement or respect from any alien species.

It wasn't very hard to convince people to accept a one world government because the world had already been using a global electronic currency called the GEM (Global Electronic Money) since 2018. It was a centralized e-currency created and controlled by the world banks. The creation and introduction of the GEM was promoted as a way to solve the worst financial collapse in the history of the world. It was a global debt crisis which started in 2015 and lasted until 2018 when they replaced the broken USD with the GEM as the new world reserve currency. The next economic collapse didn't happen until 2086 when the worlds oil reserves were completely dried up.

By the time we had used up all the oil we had many other alternative energy sources but the market still took a large hit because so much of our technology was still reliant on petroleum based fuels and it was only a matter of time before we used up other fossil fuels. It took another 15 years before we were able to develop a viable solution capable of completely replacing oil and all other fossil fuels. In 2101 a great scientist named Mervin Hower developed an energy generation unit capable of extracting around 1% of the energy from any form of matter in terms of E=mc^2. The result of which is virtually free energy.

One percent might sound like a small number, but keep in mind that if you convert 1 gram of mass into pure energy then you could run a 100 watt light bulb for 30,000 years. That means if you can get even 1% of the energy from 1 gram of mass then your 100 watt bulb will run for 300 years (30000 x 0.01). Hower called his invention the E-Core reactor and by 2120 nearly every home on Earth was equipped with a mini E-Core reactor, making Hower the richest person on Earth. Now all anyone needed was a handful of dirt to produce all the power they could ever use in their entire life times.

Many speculators and pundits theorized that such cheap energy would only further agitate the market downturn which started in 2086 due to the end of oil. However it helped to replace oil and ignited a revitalization of many industries and spurred a great deal of innovation from people who previously didn't have access to an abundant energy source. Suddenly many people in poor areas of the world had the ability to build and create their own businesses and technology. The E-Core helped turn the world economy around and the world wouldn't see another market collapse until 2130 when precious metals became worthless due to elemental mastery enabled by a successful "Theory of Everything".

In 2118, just 12 years before we developed a Theory of Everything, another great scientist named Gerald Fitz took advantage of the E-Core reactor to develop the first warp drive propulsion unit. It takes an extreme amount of power in order to warp space-time, but with the advent of the E-Core it became feasible. A dozen kilograms of matter could easily let you cruise around the galaxy for a week or more. By 2120 mankind had begun the colonization of the solar system. However, the "Fitz drive", as it was called, was quickly blacklisted by the FCE as highly regulated technology and as a result the process of space colonization was much slower than it could have been.

The leaders of Earth couldn't justify the suppression of the E-Core, but they could easily justify the suppression of the warp drive by citing the war on drugs and human trafficking. They were not going give people to the ability to leave the planet and explore space on their own. The mere idea of people having that much freedom was like a nightmare to the controlling class of Earth. Then in 2121, just three years after the warp drive was invented, a teleportation device was built by a private research company based on principles learned from the warp drive. The teleportation technology was blacklisted even faster than the warp drive.

The only legal use for teleportation technology was in international transport and it was a highly regulated industry. Within a decade of its invention all the major airline companies switched over to teleportation units and stopped using aircraft because it was so much faster, safer and cheaper. Likewise, the only approved use for the warp drive was in government sanctioned space craft which were used to colonize Mars and eventually some of the moons around Jupiter, specifically Europa, Triton, Callisto and Ganymede. Any planets further than Mars and Jupiter were too far away from the Sun and didn't have the necessary conditions to harbour human life.

The places in the solar system which we did colonize were not terraformed because the process takes thousands of years and we lack the knowledge required. Instead we built large domes with artificial atmospheres and large underground cities which were powered and heated by huge E-Core reactors and used oxygen recycling systems to fill them with breathable air. The dome cities were controlled by the FCE but many of the underground cities were built and occupied by "rebels" who believed Mars should have its own independent form of government. The vast majority of rebels were people born before 2099, before the conformist generations.

Although the use of the teleporter and the warp drive propulsion system were highly regulated, it didn't take long for a black market to spawn around these technologies inside of the rebel territory. Before long they had set up teleportation links between Earth and Mars and this caused a massive population increase on Mars. In order to handle the increasing population numbers, the size and scope of the rebel cities on Mars grew dramatically. Over time the size and technological capabilities of the rebel societies became a threat to the FCE but there was very little they could do about it because they were located deep under the surface of Mars.

The rebels attained their own independent economy with their own forms of currency and eventually they created their own system of government to force the FCE to recognize them as an independent nation. They became known as the United Confederation of Mars (UCM). They called it a confederation because it was a loosely connected set of underground cities and territories which each had a high degree of autonomy. With the hatred many of them felt towards the highly centralized FCE government it wasn't a surprise to anyone that they decided to structure it like this. It was only natural that they would value decentralization as a means of maximizing liberty.

By 2220, 100 years after the colonization of the solar system began, the UCM was a fully formed nation begrudgingly recognized by the FCE. It is in this year that the hero of our story is born. Zark, as he would be named by his mother, was born in a UCM city called Mazpoc, only one year after his older brother Leon. Sadly, they lost their parents at a young age and together they would lead a life of hardship until one day they would acquire their own ship with warp drive capabilities. With the stage now set, we are ready to follow the adventures of Zark and Leon and their faithful crew on their journey throughout the galaxy on board the ship named Eris...

NOTICE: Do not copy my ideas and make any part of this story into a novel, movie, or any other type of commercial/profitable venture without my explicit written permission. You may contact me via PM on this message board if you have any questions. Thank you.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder


Actually your story now belongs to the site per t&c's. You no longer have the rights to publish this and make a profit.

Woodcarver
reply to post by ChaoticOrder

 

Actually your story now belongs to the site per t&c's. You no longer have the rights to publish this and make a profit.

I think the T&C's say that ATS has the right to use my material in their promotional activities or something along those lines, it's been a long time since I read the T&C properly. But it doesn't say that I no longer have ownership of the material I post here. I don't see why I wouldn't have a right to publish this and make a profit from it, not that I really intend to. But if I did and ATS tried to stop me I would take them to court.

EDIT: just read the T&C again and you are partially right. It says that by posting on ATS I must relinquish all "exclusive copyrights" to my material. That would appear to suggest that I have nonexclusive copyright of the material I post here because ATS also gets a royalty-free ownership of my material. However it also says "You also grant all third parties the right to copy, distribute, display, reproduces, and publicly perform the materials you post under the terms of the Creative Commons License", which would suggest that any content I post here is no longer protected by any copyrights, it's simply free for anyone to use in any way they wish.

Well I guess I wont be posting the rest of this story on ATS. I'll have to find another website which has more respect for personal copyrights and then post the link to the other chapters on ATS.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder


Well it sounds pretty good. Keep it up and e-mail me a copy when your ready.

I love stuff like that.