Murat
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Makine Mühendisi
Samsun
99 okur puanı
Mart 2015 tarihinde katıldı
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Okuma Hedefleri
“Another similarity: You and me both willing to die for our people. Why, question? Evolution hate death.”
“It’s good for the species,” I say. “A self-sacrifice instinct makes the species as a whole more likely to continue.”
“Not all Eridians willing to die for others.”
I chuckle. “Not all humans either.”
“You and me are good people,” Rocky says.
“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”
My lungs, now full of carbon dioxide, panic. But the adrenaline
rush doesn’t give me the strength I need to escape. It just keeps me
awake so I can experience death in more detail.
“Be careful,” says Rocky. “You are friend now.”
Okur Takip Önerileri
“Oh! Wow. Why did it break off?”
He wiggles his carapace. “Not know. Many things break. My people make ship very hurry. No time to make sure all things work good.”
Deadline-induced quality issues: a problem all over the galaxy.
“Sure. Solar particles are just hydrogen atoms emitted by the sun. Sometimes a magnetic storm on the sun can cause it to spit out a whole bunch of them. Other times it’s relatively quiet. And lately, the Astrophage infection has been robbing so much energy from the sun that magnetic storms are less common.” “Horrifying,” she said. “I know. Did you hear that global warming has been almost undone?” She nodded. “Humanity’s recklessness with our environment accidentally bought us an extra month of time by pre-heating the planet.” “We fell in poop and came out smelling like roses,” I said.
He leaned forward. “Africa needs infrastructure. To do that, they need power. And they have nine million square kilometers of useless land that gets some of the most intense continuous sunlight on Earth. The Sahara Desert is just sitting there, waiting to give them everything they need. All we needed to do was build the damn power plants!”
“I don’t like little dictators in their little kingdoms,” she said. “Drives me crazy.”
I sigh. “My original crew was three. Now it’s just me.” I put my hand up against the divider.
Rocky puts a claw on the divider opposite my hand. “Bad.” “Bad bad bad,” I say.
We stay like that for a moment. “I’ll watch you sleep.” “Good. Me sleep,” he says.
His arms relax and he looks for all the world like a dead bug. He floats free in his side of the tunnel, no longer hanging on to any support bars.
“Well, you’re not alone anymore, buddy,” I say. “Neither of us are.”
Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.
Before leaving the cockpit, I take one last look at the Telescope screen. I don’t know why—I guess I just like to keep track of what extraterrestrial ships in my vicinity are up to. The Blip-A spins in space. It rotates end-over-end, probably at the exact same rate as the Hail Mary. I guess they saw me spin up the centrifuge and figured it was another communication thing. Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.
“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”
After an eternity, the panic begins to ebb away. Human brains are amazing things. We can get used to just about anything.
Today's Info
Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to watch your food cook without melting your face off.
“You want me to look at the dots?” I said.
“Yes.”
“The whole world put you in charge of solving this problem, and
you came directly to a junior high school science teacher?”
“Yes.”
I run the numbers and come up with an answer I don’t like. The
gravity in this room is too high. It’s 15 meters per second per second
when it should be 9.8. That’s why things falling “feel” wrong to me.
They’re falling too fast. And that’s why I’m so weak despite these
muscles. Everything weighs one and a half times as much as it
should.
Thing is, nothing affects gravity. You can’t increase or decrease it.
Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second. Period. And I’m
experiencing more than that. There’s only one possible explanation.
I’m not on Earth.