The settlement of CatTown

This is my attempt to relate a brief history of the town of Catville, on the planet known as Lupo 2. I am writing it as much to strengthen my own recollection as to instruct future readers.



As I begin to write this history we are nearing the end of the month of Dec in the year 2499 EC (Earth Calendar).



My part in this history began very long ago - in the latter half of Earth's 20th century. My life was a normal one - childhood, college, a career as an engineer - when two significant developments changed the lives of everybody on the planet. The first of these developments came out of Japan, where scientists and medical researchers finally figured out how to clone human organs from the tissues of the organ recipient. This had been done on a small scale before, but early in the 21st century the Japanese team, lead by Dr. Hokeo Nasaka, removed the last barriers to growing new copies of all organs. Within very few years of the announcement, Dr Nasaka's team had perfected techniques to regrow organs inside the recipient's body, in parallel with the organs being replaced. In this way a failing heart, for instance, could be grown parallel to a failing heart, taking over the load as it grew, allowing surgeons finally to excise the ailing heart. Multiple organ replacements became common - the threshold for successful replacement seemed to be around 90%. Simultaneous replacement of less than this limit normally worked, while replacing more than this limit normally failed. It was even possible to regrow a brain, but not in place. Many ethecists, though, questioned the wisdom of brain replacement, and the courts were unable to decide whether an individual with a regrown brain was the same individual as the original.



The second major advance that changed mankind for ever was the invention by Dr. Chernikovski of faster than light travel my means of the Manifold Engine. Science fiction had for several decades suggested the possibility of "folding space" such that one could travel from point A to a far distant point B by folding space until the points were nearly adjacent. Dr. Chernikovski actually perfected this technique. He utilized what he named "Manifold Energy", a curious amalgamation of gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves, and other forms of energy that he said are all-present and are closely related to each other. Besides providing the Grand Unified Theory that had long been the Holy Grail of physics, this discovery allowed the warping of the fabric of space within a very small area, allowing a vessel inside this very small area to travel lightyears of distance in seconds. An unfortunate side effect of this travel was a phenomenon that came to be knows as "Bow Shock". While the fabric of space can be warped, there is some sort of energy barrier between the edges that have been pulled close together. Traveling through that barrier results in the release of very turbulent energy, with the amplitude of the energy proportional to the distance being spanned by the warped space. Early test vessels sent on Manifold voyages were usually unable to survive the bow shock. leaving fragments along a long path between the origin and intended destination points.



An additional complication of Manifold travel was the fact that once we moved beyond our own solar system we didn't really know as much about our neighboring star systems as we used to think. The presence of black holes, large concentrations of dark matter, and some of the truly exotic species of astronomical phenomena have a huge effect on the calculations needed to initiate a Manifold jump. Early attempts to jump to the Alpha Centauri system, even if they were able to survive the bow shock, always ended up far distant from their intended destinations. Early probes were equipped with wide-field telescopes, large ephemerides, and enough computing power to identify from star positions where they were located. Using the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (the practical use of entangled particles as a communication medium was one of the earliest side effects of Manifold Energy studies) these craft were able to report back to earth researchers where they ended up, and this was the source of great consternation to earth scientists.



After several horribly inaccurate attempts to reach the Centauri system an earth researcher (Dr. Coop from CalTech) decided to use one of the misdirected probes to collect information on detectable low magnitude objects. It took several weeks to reprogram the selected probe via the entanglement link, but once this was complete it took the repurposed probe only a few months to detect and map several dark matter clusters in the general area, as well as several clusters and a couple suspected black holes between Centauri and Sol. Once this information was returned to earth, a new Manifold Path was calculated, another probe was launched, and the new probe ended up within a tenth of a light year of it's intended destination - better than an order of magnitude improvement over all previous attempts. This exciting result was the trigger of a flood of shorter distance Manifold jumps by mapping craft, leading to a huge increase in the amount of knowledge Earth scientists possessed about surrounding regions of space.



A few overly enthusiastic groups tried to capitalize on the expanding knowledge base by trying to make manned jumps. An Italian team successfully jumped an exploration team to the surface of Mars and returned them a few days later. Pakistan sent an exploration team to the Alpha Centauri system, and they reported via entangle-link that they arrived safely, but when they attempted to return to Earth their craft did not survive the bow shock. China built a massive vessel that they called an Ark Ship, designed to carry 60 people, and tried to send it to the Alpha Centauri system, but the ship didn't survive the initial bow shock. We know there were a lot of smaller, privately operated attempts to make long jumps, but information on these was usually suppressed.



This knowledge increase also resulted in the calculations needed for any out-of-system jump becoming much more complicated. These complications lead to advances in the field of digital signal processing. This is where I come in to the picture. I was an average electrical engineer, working an average career in communications, but my hobby was digital signal processing. Digital signal processors are electronic chips that are highly specialized little computers, specially designed to do mathematical calculations very quickly. Designs that were fairly new at that time allowed for multiple DSP chips to be configured to work in parallel with each other. This allowed for the creation of compact, inexpensive calculation engines that could do computational tasks that used to require days on massive, expensive supercomputers in a matter of hours. That was my field - developing parallel computation engines. Once I learned about the calculations needed to plan a Manifold jump, and got my hands on a recent ephemeris, I monkeyed around in my home lab for a few months and developed a box with 256 DSP chips, a small data server, and a single user terminal. A friend of mine was a scientist at JPL, and he worked with me to optimize my calculation algorithms, and he helped me do a comparison test. He programmed a jump from earth to Alpha Centauri on the supercomputer. The calculations ran for 6 days. I then entered the endpoints into my calculation engine and had a result in 2 hours. He compared our results, and they were within a very small tolerance of each other. He and I called in a third friend, an attorney who specialized in intellectual property protection, and we formed a corporation to develop and market the computation engines. This is how JumpBox Inc came to be.



Another technological advance that arose as a side effect of Manifold Engine technology was power generation. Twentieth century Earth scientists became aware of a phenomenon knows as "quantum noise". I am not a physicist, so I can't give you a completely correct description, but I can describe it to the level of detail needed for an engineering understanding. All matter is made of particles. From basic atomic particles like protons, electrons, and neutrons, to more exotic particles like positrons and anti-protons, down to subatomic particles like quarks and mesons and others, all particles have energy. There is a baseline energy level always present, but there are also small variations in this baseline energy level. These variations are quantum noise. The Manifold Engine, when it is not being used to warp space-time, harvests the minute variations in baseline energy. This means that the Manifold Engine serves as an always-on power source, sort of like an everlasting battery. A handful of engineering students on earth's African continent designed a very small Manifold Engine that was optimized to harvest quantum noise, and managed to produce a design that was inexpensive enough that charities could afford to build them, donate them to remote African villages, and provide those villages with electrical power to pump water and provide light and heat. Since the smaller engines weren't powerful enough to actually perform a Manifold Jump, they came to be called Power Engines.



Here was the picture at the end of the year 2015: humankind has Manifold Energy jump technology and a newly expanded knowledge of the surrounding parts of the universe, new exploration probes are jumping farther and farther away and sending back their discoveries, and an affordable means of calculating Manifold jumps is commercially available. A group of wealthy businessmen decided that the time was right for mankind to step away from Sol and make his home elsewhere, so they formed a coalition to build the Earth's first successful off-Earth colony. They consulted with a lot of specialists to determine how many people would be needed to allow a colony to thrive, what kinds of people, what supplies would be needed, etc. They worked for more than 5 years to draw up their plans - and they did it in total secrecy. They ended up planning a colony of 750 people, distributed across 6 Manifold jump ships. Once the plans were complete they began selecting their colonists - again in secrecy. I was shocked when I was contacted by the coalition and asked to be a member of the initial jump team. The leaders of the coalition realized how critical it would be to have the means to perform fast, accurate calculations of jump parameters, and they decided that the engineer who perfected the calculations and the calculation engine would be a vital part of their preliminary team. Since I also had background in communications and had spent most of my life hunting small game, I was one of the few people to designated as a Triple Specialist (General Engineering, Communications, and Provisioning). This initial team would travel to the Alpha Centauri system, then explore some of the M-class planets that remote probes had identified. Once a suitable planet was located, we would land and do some physical exploration, and if our choice proved correct the remaining jump ships would follow.



I'll save you the effort of reading about the boring exploration phase - for me, this phase was spent in the ship's computer lab doing experiments, reading some of the novels from the ship's library, or playing poker with other non-astronomers. After 6 months of jumping around the Centauri system we were presented with a choice of 5 candidate worlds. The number was amazing - we expected to find only one, but there were 5 planets whose distance from the stars Alpha Centauri A. B, and C allowed them to have temperatures compatible with human life. Of the 5, 3 were found to have an abundance of liquid water. Of the 3, 1 was observed to have a noticeable amount of volcanic activity. None of the final 3 was found to contain what we could easily identify as intelligent higher life forms. We finally resorted to a game of chance to select one of the 3. One of the original founders of the coalition was on this ship with us, so he claimed the right to name our new home planet, and he named the planet "Lupo". Our orbital surveys had located a slight depression, roughly hexagonal in shape, about 5 kilometers across. Our ship landed near the eastern edge of this depression. Our teams followed the plans drafted before we left Earth- we set up a tent city, launched aerial reconnaissance craft to survey the planet surface in some detail, and scientists in several disciplines began detailed studies of the planet. We set up Power Engines to provide heat and light to the campsite, and to drive our communications equipment. As a triple specialist I was kept insanely busy. We needed reliable communications with the autonomous aerial survey craft and the field exploration teams, the biology and botany teams needed data links between their field units and the master data server at base camp, sanitary facilities had to be established, and as a Provisioning specialist I accompanied biology teams as a specimen agent.



The fields of biology and botany had progressed to the point that scientists could take tissue samples from living organisms, scan them with multiple scanning technologies, and develop detailed understanding of the nature of the studied organisms in very short time. In our case, the studies indicated which of the indigenous species would be suited as food sources, which would be dangerous to us, and which we could afford to not worry about. Other teams identified safe sources of water, areas of geological hazards, and other data points that were likely to be important to further development of Lupo. Within a few short months our teams had identified several dozen native plants that would provide nutrition, several abundant small animals that could be used as a food source, areas of level ground close to the landing site where we could grow crops, and several nearby Artesian wells supplying clean water. A meeting of the senior survey team members determined that we had established a base camp that met all the prerequisites for further colonization, so we used the Tangle-link to notify the Earth-side teams. Less than a week later we had two more Jump ships grounded within our hexagonal crater, and three more ships landed on a broad plain on the other side of the planet. Once all the colonists had been settled and everything appeared to be progressing smoothly, we moved on to the second major step of the settlement plan - dismantling 2/3 of the Jump Ship fleet and using the recovered materials to build a more permanent settlement. The duralumin skin and struts of the ships were used to construct offices, a meeting hall, storerooms, and finally residential units. Each res unit had enough room to comfortably house 2 people, practically house 4, and with some discomfort could shelter 8 people. The double- and triple-specialists were allowed to live by themselves if they chose to. I'm not fond of socializing, so I took advantage of this. I selected a duralum res unit immediately adjacent to the sanitary plant (as a General Engineering specialist, one of my primary responsibilities was keeping the sanitation system running properly).



Life soon settled into a smooth, boring consistency. No major problems were encountered, no surprises arose, nothing threatened our quiet existence. Back on Earth things weren't nearly as quiet - the Earth-side political entities were engaging in their usual amount of bickering and warfare, despots were perfecting their genocide techniques, the population was growing much faster than the ability to provide food and clean water. Within 5 years of the establishment of our colony, we stopped piping Earth news reports to the hab units - nobody wanted to be exposed to the bad news any more. Instead we focused on figuring how to make use the of the resources our new home planet had to offer. Early orbital scans had detected subsurface deposits of metals and minerals- aluminum, iron, copper, silicon, gold, silver, uranium, and the like. Mission planners had anticipated this, and among the tools and equipment that we had unloaded from the Jump Ships had been mining cannons and distillation equipment. While the industrial mining enterprises on Earth dug massive pits and tunnels, used devastating amounts of poisonous and destructive chemicals, and released untold tonnes of pollutants into the environment, our technology teams had perfected a means of using compact projectors of charged particles to vaporize small strips of surface material, collect the vapors, and condense the constituent materials in very pure from the vapors. We therefor established a mining camp a few kilometers from the base camp, with half a dozen mining cannon working an exposed cliff face and producing ingots of raw materials. The Executive Board decided that we were producing more raw material than we could use ourselves, so they authorized the establishment of trade routes between Lupo and Earth, and with any other colony worlds that might be settled in the foreseeable future. A cargo port was established near the mining camp, and the two remaining Jump Ships were based there. We made several dozen jumps back to Earth in the next 5 years, delivering metals and returning with luxury items like specialized foods, fine fabrics we had not yet figured out how to make, advanced medical supplies, and tools. After 5 years of these trading trips we added trade runs to new colonies on Mars and Luna. We also learned that the Coalition officers remaining on Earth had decided that life on Earth was becoming too dangerous, so they set up another colony expedition, again to the Alpha Centauri system, and shortly afterwards we started trading with the new colony on planet Erin (the third of the planets wet had identified as candidate worlds). Taking advantage of the things we had learned, and occasionally shuttling specialists between Lupo and Erin, the new colonists were soon joining us in shipping mineral resources out of our star system.



What followed was a little over a hundred years of quiet growth. Making free use of medical rejuv technology, us original colonists were joined by Lupo-born colonists. We established a system of education, training, and evaluation to insure that the colony would always have an adequate base of all the requisite skill sets. The evaluation system we developed was a 9-tiered rating system based upon skills learned and demonstrated. Those of use who originally came from earth were for the most part level 9 ranked (there are some advantages to being nearly 200 years old, after all), and we were able to establish institutions of higher learning that were shared between colonies. Residents of our base colony, the other Lupo colony on the other side of Lupo, and the 3 Erin colonies all sent students to the various specialized schools. Base colony housed the medical and biological sciences institutes, Lupo2 was the home of the engineering and physics institutes, Erin Prime housed the mining sciences institute, etc. We soon had a busy little outpost humming along nicely. I was content, doing work that enjoyed among people that I enjoyed, and able to study fields that were of interest to me.



In the year 2117 EC an astronomical observation platform on the far side of the Centauri system Tangle-linked some puzzling information. It had detected a large object entering the Centauri system from the general vicinity of the Rigel system. As the object drew closer to the observation platform it resolved into a large ventral body with a cloud of smaller bodies surrounding it. Electromagnetic sensors on the observation platform measured faint EM signals within the large body and between the large body and the cloud, but the signals were not similar to anything in our central data stores. The engineering and physics institutes built and launched a more specialized probe intended to study this object more closely. Imaging scans revealed that the large body was a roughly hexagonal body, and the cloud accompanying the large body consisted of much smaller hexagonal objects.