Excerpt from Julius Paine's Memoirs: Journals of the Wanderer

Published 2035

In my penthouse a shield closed around the plasma battery. Neodymium magnets on powered arms moved towards the centerline perpendicular to the height of the building. A tiny computer located outside the shield commanded the arm to inscribe small circles around on opposite sides of the sphere.

The plasma inside the battery made two cylindrical vortices that pushed the plasma into the top of the battery. The protons went one way, the electrons the other. The protons crashed into the roof of the battery and bounced off. As they cycled back down to the middle of the battery, the vortex pulled them back to the roof without allowing them to impact the bottom end.

When the vortex acquired a designated amount of strength, the motion of the arm tightened until the only motion in the arms was a rotation about the centerline of the sphere.

The rotation in the plasma became stable.

There was more pressure on the top interior surface than the bottom.

The sphere was structurally connected to the building’s frame.

The building shook with a frequency in the visual range, and those on the lower floors felt that they were on the smoothest train they had ever ridden. The cables disconnected and for the first time since the building’s construction, the city was bathed in only the light of the sun and the moon.

When the building broke out of the water for the first time, bystanders said they saw dolphins jumping from the water to catch it. As the building rose gently from the earth, the citizens of New York City watched a similar building move in from the east, and drop into the position previously occupied by the world’s largest and newest spacecraft.

The cables rose from the water, straightened by composite piezoelectric actuator shells that surrounded them. When the cables reattached to the new building the colors popped back into existence as though they had never left.

People in New York swore that the new building’s colors were more beautiful than the original.

All of the pictures of people floating in space have nothing to do with what life was like aboard the Creator. The ship moved with a constant acceleration in the direction of that the building was typically oriented. That acceleration had been designed to correspond to exactly 9.8 meters per second squared, or the acceleration due to gravity at sea level on the surface of the Earth.

It was not artificial gravity.

Life on board the ship was much more like a futuristic sit-com, except that the living spaces were actually oriented in the direction of the ship’s motion. People on board the ship wrote about it as though they were living and working and in an office building, and by far the nicest of its type. People spent their days exercising, working, eating, and generally doing all the things that people normally do.

Some portions of the VI building had undergone a retrofitting to prepare her for the trip to space. Most of what had been the underwater portions of the building had been transformed into the world’s most efficient waste-treatment plant. For the time being it was the single greatest weakness of the ship—the excrement could not be used for fertilization for 6 years without risking the health of the crew, something no one had any wish to do.

The floors above that had been converted into greenhouses both hydroponic and conventional.

I don’t think that such a simple statement can really encompass the enormity of the undertaking. Those who chose to do so could trade time tending the plants for food. Those who wished could walk through the three floors of the greenhouse with a basket of their choice, pick their food, and return to their living spaces to cook it.

A floor above that hosted a small group of livestock whose slaughter was strictly regulated by a jovial man with a limp. His insistence that every part of every animal be used within the first week of its death was whole-heartedly supported by the entire project. Bones were turned into bullion and broth; hides were one of the priciest items on the stream. Few people had thought to bring a full wardrobe; only one very satisfied compentitor had thought to bring fabric-manufacturing technology. People learned to love eating rabbit and insects. They also learned to wash their clothes every day after the first outbreak of staph.

My favorite part of the greenhouse was the herb room. It was one of the only completely sealed spaces on the ship. Row after row of fragrant plants would have set practically everyone on the ship sneezing. When I had free time I would wander down the rows and try to name them all. There was one that I had never seen on Earth with broad leaves and tiny spherical nuts that smelled like a citrus-like bay. Every time I saw someone near it I would ask if they knew what it was.

There were a few cannabis plants that got regular visitors, and a very small psilocybin mushroom garden that abutted the much larger ‘normal’ mushroom patch. No one had the option of a private habit, so our use rates were lower than the Earth norm.

There were public cooking stations that people used to sell meals. That was my favorite hangout. After my role in the creation of the IPE, inertial propulsion engine, became known, my score went through the roof. We sold the rights to hundreds of engines of different sizes at exorbitant prices. Callisto and I took such a commanding lead of the highest overall value produced that I felt my time would be better spent on the public forum.

I didn’t mention that it was also where I thought I could do the Conspiracy the most good. It was also where I most wanted to be. Even after my reintegration into society I had been startlingly isolated both by my fame and my choices. Some of the people on the Creator regarded me with awe, but most just took my presence in stride. I felt like the people that I met finally valued me for something that I loved doing. I let myself be happy.

A small number of people took advantage of our unique location to perform microgravity experiments. We had purchased a smaller class of spacecraft for expressly that purpose, and Callisto graciously allowed their use as part of the facilities of the vessel. The experiments that could tolerate G as well a microgravity were launched into our extrapolated path, run, and picked up when the building caught up. Those that could not were gently nudged onto an orbit to be picked up on the return journey.

Questro had more microgravity experiments than anyone.

I guess I should explain that there were many paths to winning the contest. At a meeting very early on in the year long trip, all of the members voted that the three most crucial categories were overall output, research efficiency, and most efficient resource consumption. Callisto agreed that we needed to send a message to world that conservation was of the most crucial importance; we enacted a BCS-like scoring system that would be used to determine the final winner.

I surprised myself by leading the efficient resource category. Apparently cooking was one of the most important resource-hungry tasks. When there would be a large gathering, as for a vote of the local government, or someone’s birthday I would try my hand at catering. I was by no means the most highly paid chef, but some people swore that mine was the cooking they wanted to eat in heaven.

The first time I heard that I just laughed. The second time I asked if that wasn’t where we were.

Lauria was one of the busiest people aboard the vessel. Many aboard the ship had not accounted for a change in lifestyle affecting their health. There were five doctors on board and five nurses. At times they were frenetically busy; most of the time they were simply overwhelmed. Callisto made a blanket apology to everyone on board for his deficient judgment in the matter of the quantity of medical personnel. Then he offered to personally pay anyone who would intern as a nurse.

Every night when she came back to our rooms, I would greet her with dinner and a smile. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. It was right that we would be together and so it would always be. After we made love she would make happy sounds that somewhat resembled language, and kiss me on whatever part of my body she happened to be close to until she fell asleep. I would pretend to try to keep her awake and whisper in her ear about my day. If she couldn’t help but smile she would groan and complain and we would do it all again.

The tension and distance that had been growing between us disappeared inside a fortnight. Somehow I didn’t seem to smoke very often, and when I did I didn’t really notice anything unusual about what I saw and experienced, on screens or off. Occasionally Grace would tell me that she hadn’t generated any results from the program that I had set her to run during our show and tell sessions. I wasn’t terribly bothered by that. There wasn’t really anything that bothered me during the honeymoon period of our voyage.

Oh, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Callisto was elected mayor of the town. That is how he ran too: Mayor of the Creator. He laughed and said that the he was priming himself for a run at public office. He was sure the experience of being a mayor of the a 1000 person self-sustaining spacecraft would convert to being a Senator.

The captain himself was not participating in the games. He was a walrus-faced, middle-aged man of impeccable fitness and average height named Conroy. He was supremely popular about the vessel because he took everything seriously and never laughed. I know appreciated a sober hand on the tiller given Callisto’s penchant for whimsy.

At the Captain’s request Callisto had a robot built to follow him around and serve as a remote command deck in the event of an emergency. There were none. We drilled weekly anyways. No one complained much. They were the cream of the world’s crop, and they all knew that preparation made winners and prevented losers. Annagail was the City Manager. She had managed to make herself indispensible to all of the major powers in the competition. She was the most likely to win the contestant voting category of the competition.

We had more power than we needed. The second battery in Cal’s penthouse was slowly charged in case of an emergency. We had discharged it as a safety precaution before launch. Cal had insisted that I install all of the same equipment on his battery that I had in mine so that we had backup propulsion in the event that the first IPE failed.

I lost track of the time.

Those who were interested made calendars based on our location between the Earth and Moon. It worked out to about a month an orbit. At the zenith of our orbit around the dark side of the moon, the ship would undergo 2 minutes of weightlessness while the ship turned around to reverse the direction of acceleration. The same happened around the back of the Earth. Some of the best ratings over the entirety of the event were filmed during those minutes.

They were shown on pay-per-view late at night, after the children had been put to bed,

In general though, the show got terrible ratings, but so much money had been invested that it still aired on four channels a day. No one on the ship cared at all. No one on the ship watched the show; hardly anyone watched media of any sort. A spirit of adventure had taken hold of everyone. People said that they felt like they would always remember this as the part of their life where they gave the most to science; where they gave the most to their legacies.

About once a week I would give a seminar on some topic or another. Most of the time it was about some facet of life in space that people had aired to me while I fed them. Occasionally I would allow myself to enter into a truly political area. Most of those speeches were written for me with Grace’s help as a way to manipulate the Chinese government.

Grace continued running the program that I had set her the morning after our first game. Then, at one of our show-and-tells, she said that she had found several patterns and was analyzing them for authorship. She had been trawling through data from before my return, and there was plenty of recorded moments when I had been high and watching media to mine from.

She suspected that they were merely packets of grouped randomness that would result in any data set of that magnitude. Despite her massive capacity, it was still a huge task.

I kept giving her new data to work with, but as I said, not as much.