Виктор Зуев
The Falling Bird
Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum.
René Descartes
The administration responsible for finding promising new ways of discovering edible vegetation on distant planets that could prolong human life hastily assembled a covert division tasked with launching a spacecraft mission into the Canes Venatici constellation. Their reports suggested that that area contained a faintly visible planet on which the first cosmonauts to explore its surface discovered an undying moss-like plant which, when eat continuously, made one immortal.
The Center for Elementary Rationing and Productive Labor on New Exoplanets in the Solar System was located one level below, at the end of the hall behind the fire escape. Hardly anyone ever stopped by there, as all their methods for preparing and distributing material goods, produce and other items of value had long become obsolete due to new developments and rapidly changing priorities in era of explosive development in interplanetary travel, And also due to the fact that long-haul flights paid quite well. Yet none of the executives wanted to admit this, habitually employing a whole department of twenty five experienced senior female staffers consisting mainly of close and distant relatives of the top brass.
Their job was to calculate the requisite amount of food, extra clothing, everyday goods and money for colonists on the next newly discovered planet, referring to manuals approved many decades ago and doing their best to follow those to the letter. These manuals spelled out the number of bureaucrats, guards, supply agents, merchants, regular workers, agitators, and, above all, the leaders dedicated to their people. In order to provide for this core group of people required to sustain productive life on a new exoplanet, the Center would calculate the spaceship capacity needed to carry all the necessary supplies food, air, water and other essential resources that would be required during the long interplanetary journey, right down to toilet paper.
The spacecraft, easily exceeding the speed of light, would biannually be shipped out to one of the explored planets orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, named Abba, which takes almost a whole year of travel time. Upon arrival, everyone on board would disembark and begin collecting the moss in the underground caves and deep hollows of that planet. Sparse reddish thin lichen-like build-ups grow on the rocks in the caves one millimeter every ten years and the workers dispatched to the planet would scrape them off, package and store on the spacecraft to be sent back to Earth. Harvesting of the lichen would continue until all of the ships storage modules specially designed to carry it under certain temperature and humidity conditions were completely full usually this process would take up to a month and a half. After that, the surviving and homesick members of the crew (after undergoing a strict filtration) would return to Earth along with the valuable cargo.
The thing is that this lichen was needed on Earth as a reliable and tested medicine to prolong the lives of honored and notable people threefold. However, this method of extracting and delivering of the lichen to Earth was extremely expensive and took a long time, plus its existence on Abba was very scarce. And sometimes on the transit back home, the miners of that valuable cargo would eat some of it themselves to prolong their own lives, despite a strict law forbidding mere mortals from doing so under penalty of death. The first offenders had been dealt with precisely that way upon returning to Earth they had been summarily executed by firing squad to set an example for others.
And these prohibition violators were caught quite easily: those who consumed several grams of that valuable lichen would develop a persistent and lingering garlicky breath, like all governing and elite citizens of Earth who partook in the ambrosia made from the lichen. The odor could be temporarily masked with strong aromatic substances or by eating plenty of fatty foods, but as soon as the unpleasant smell was no longer covered up by these methods, the garlicky breath would come back to the super-centenarians. And since this persistent smell was practically impossible to get rid of, people began to identify the elite super-centenarians by their distinctive stench. And not just that by mandated laws for the people, the stink gradually began to be viewed as an aura of pomp and wealth. Naturally, regular Earth folk were not supposed to smell this way, so a whole series of regulations and decrees were passed prohibiting people from growing and eating garlic and its byproducts, so that their breath would not be confused of that of the governing elite.
As a result, workers and crews who had come back from the off-world lichen mining missions were easily probed during quarantine; anyone who was detected with the garlic breath was detained and executed. However, it was noticed later that within the prison cells where the ambrosia eaters had been kept, various insects (cockroaches, caterpillars, fleas) and other bloodsuckers would thrive for a long time even though the spaces were empty and had been disinfected multiple times after the criminals had been executed.
After pathologists had carefully investigated this strange phenomenon occurring in the prison cells where felons convicted for illegally consuming ambrosia were kept, the following was discovered: while condemned individuals were imprisoned and awaiting execution which could go on for weeks the insects living in the same space would actively inhale the air exhaled by the prisoners and thus prolonged their lives manifold, consequently developing an immunity to all toxins.
Earlier, scientists and political strategists had frequently noticed that after contact between the leaders and their electorate, the latter were imbued with extra energy having inhaled the garlicky exhaust from the mouths of the dignitaries, and could work for free for a while if fed simple peasant foods. And thus a question was raised: what was the point of executing the convicts right away if they could still be of use to the law-abiding populace of Earth?
The brass hats made the right call. They began placing convicts in specially built barracks with a powerful exhaust ventilation, and next to them compact health care centers were being built, equipped with the powerful system sucking in the garlicky air coming from those barracks; these became health resorts where the honored laborers working for the good of the motherland could enjoy rest and relaxation and so that worthy working classes could too taste or rather, inhale the elite garlic aroma in order to lessen the divide between the rich and the poor and, if possible, to prolong length of service of the able-bodied, rank-worshipping flock.
However, the surplus of the lichen brought from Abba kept depleting all the time. Whether because its reserves found in the planets hollows and caves were getting exhausted or theft of ambrosia had become more creative. At the same time, the number of the relatives of Earths elite kept growing exponentially due to increase in life expectancy and, accordingly, more numerous offspring. It became necessary to either cull the list of those worthy to receive ambrosia something the public servants would resist with all their might, culminating in all-out brawls amongst one another or to increase punitive measures against those caught embezzling the longevity elixir on the spacecrafts returning with the valuable cargo that was extremely undesirable.
Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planets atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.
Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly running out, and already less notable officials had to visit the health center to breathe in the therapeutic air exhaled by not only those condemned to death but also all quarantined miners they were in short supply as well due to high mortality rates. The authorities had no choice but to add a regular fly spray into the air conditioning system in the visitors rooms to at least mask the fact that the garlic smell was no longer noticeable. Still, it seemed there was no solution to this insurmountable problem and the ambrosia shortage kept growing like a snowball rolling down a hillside, but a lucky strike saved the day.
The Earths brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reconnaissance missions in order to search for similar planets where the wonder lichen grew, but for a long time their efforts proved fruitless. Until finally, the explorers of the star Alpha Centauri were tipped off by the locals (those who had been marooned due to their status as a security risk) that the wonder-weed was plentiful on a remote planet, an easy-to-miss star called Asteroin in the binary star Cor Caroli (Heart of Charles) system within the Canes Venatici constellation. The star Asteroin had a lone planet slowly rotating around it, humbly named Hopus. The health-improving weed abundantly growing there not only could prolong life, but also would make a person eating it all the time flat out immortal. The test flight by the pilgrims (a name Earthlings had given to explorers travelling one-way off-world) to this planet helped discover this wonder-weed and test it on lab mice living on the pioneers starship. And the tests demonstrated that during the ten-year flight back to Earth, none of the mice had died and they thrived in good health on the ship to this day, while all the crew members died on the return journey from incurable diseases and poor quality nutrition. However, there was a downside: the travel time need to reach Asteroin and the lonely planet orbiting this star was three times longer than the average flight. Hence, both the fuel and resources (such as food, oxygen, and water) necessary to support the spacecraft and lives of the recruits onboard would be required threefold. But as a result the starship was overloaded above the maximum weight limit and could simply not get off the ground or was unable to decelerate when approaching the discovered planet, due to its monstrous mass and inertia. And who could guarantee that the sprogs, having learned about the miraculous power of the weed would even want to go back to Earth at all? It wasnt unreasonable to have concerns that they all would stay there with the crew forever. The planet Hopus was even nicknamed Hop due to its inaccessible nature, taking cues from the old proverb Dont say hop until you have hopped over. The best scientific minds of Earth had been scratching their heads for a long time trying to come up with a solution to the problem until they came up with the following:
1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.
2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.
3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.
For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves and the spacemen later on began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.
When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ships tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starships vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ships functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives its main goal was to deliver Hopus wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey cannot be foreseen, so the programmer implemented a machine learning function to GAS, functioning much like the human brain, so that it can decide on the optimal course of action in an emergency while following the principle do no harm to yourself and the cargo. To assist GAS on the ship the inventors built two androids capable to carry out simple jobs on command related to the servicing the machinery, serving the crew and system repairs if necessary.
While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ships total weight to ensure the ships return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced planners and logisticians who were located a floor below, and didnt fit into the takeoff weight of the experimental long-haul journey. To make these calculations, a separate group of classified specialists was formed to assess the most extreme conditions the flight could undergo. Much like the staff from the old department, they worked in secret during the preparation activities of the classified department to prevent information from leaking to the people, as it often happens.