He observes the usual flight instruments for airspeed, gyro, altimeter, turn, etc. And, surprisingly, there’s even a yoke for piloting the aircraft. But why would he need a control when he doesn’t know where he’s going? Another puzzle to solve…He’s more than happy for the time being, however, to remain on auto.
Then it dawns on him that he hasn’t experienced any biological urges since waking up. No thirst, no hunger, no urge to go to the toilet. This makes him wonder if he might be dead.
The thought disturbs him. He reaches forward to switch on the console. The machine powers up. Suddenly, he wants to find out what’s happening to him.
“Welcome aboard the Monarch, Traveller 1960,” the computer announces in a female voice with an American accent.
He isn’t yet ready to engage in conversation with the computer, as the machine is still a perfect stranger to him.
“Thank you,” he replies, shyly.
As he peers closer, a colourful home screen opens out. It reminds him of a kaleidoscope continuously changing its configurations of colours and shapes. As the cursor hovers over the “Enter the Stargate Navi System” tab in the centre, a pop-up message states, “No nightmares required here”. Puzzled, but reassured nonetheless, he clicks on the Enter tab.
The rainbow welcome screen instantly fades out on the monitor. In its place is what looks like a website divided into four equal, colour-coded sections. Surely there’s no internet up here?
One quadrant in the top half of the screen is green. It’s identified with the words “The Cradle of Humankind”. Next to it is a black one named “Dark Force”. Below, to the right, is a blue section. It’s marked “Earth Rising”. In the middle of the fourth and final quadrant, which is lilac, are the words: “The Future”.
It all appears mysterious. What has all this got to do with a United Nations emissary?
Since Svenson isn’t yet ready to visit the future, being in such unfamiliar conditions, he weighs up which one of the other three quadrants he’ll click. A few beads of perspiration break out on his forehead. He hesitates. What is this sweat doing? Is he alive after all? He thinks, rather, that he must be in a transitional state between living and dying, especially as there’s still no hint of hunger, or thirst, in him.
He isn’t sure why he’s suddenly become anxious. Certainly, he’s puzzled by the question of what all that history, going back to humanity’s origins, has to do with him. On the positive side, he thinks he might gain enough knowledge, by going back in time, to give him the courage he needs to understand where he’s going and what’s happening to him.
He clicks on “Earth Rising”. It’s about the Space Age, the one into which he was born. These are his times. This is an age born in the time frame of his own birth, just after the first satellites started orbiting in space. It was at the end of the time in which the baby boomer generation was born, in a cycle of human renewal after mass destruction in two World Wars.
Ayak was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 6 June 1960, an only child. It was a stable, if rather austere, home in which nothing much ever happened. Vaguely oppressed by the mediocrity and monotony of their domestic life in Söderort, in the southern suburbs, the boy lived mostly in his imagination, dreaming big dreams for himself and for his world. He also developed a rich intellectual life, quickly becoming addicted to reading. In sports, he took to cross country running, enjoying the challenge of overcoming long distances alone. This laid the foundations for a lifetime hobby of long distance running. He is lean, light and sinewy, as well as slightly bow-legged.
At school, he was something of a loner, friendly with everyone but close to no one. After matriculation, he chose to become an economist, believing in the importance of wealth creation as a component of progress. He also thought that social problems could be solved mathematically. While studying for a Master’s degree at the Stockholm School of Economics, he became a systems thinker. Only good designs worked. Only well-run systems were sustainable. Before he turned thirty, he realised he’d outgrown the suburbs, and even his home country. He did some travelling before successfully applying for a job at the United Nations, with its Economic Commission for Europe, in Geneva. Loving being part of the UN global system, he bought an apartment and settled permanently in the Swiss city, steadily working his way up to the top of UN structures in the ensuing decades.
The Earth Rising programme opens with coverage of the recent landing on Mars of the first settler community. They’re made up of a team of astronauts and cyborgs who have joined the large army of robot workers who’d built a small bubble city called Atlas on the Red Planet.
The next section covers NASA’s robotic exploration of the solar system and, after that, the history of the International Space Station. Svenson enjoys most the part about the space achievements in the 1960s, beginning with Yuri Gagarin’s triumph and the first spacewalks and ending with the Apollo manned missions to the Moon.
Afterwards, Ayak sits back in his seat and ponders. As a top UN envoy, he knows these space achievements were good for peace and progress, but down on Earth things hadn’t been so rosy. There’d been a dark side to the 60s, too.
Svenson knew he’d been a child in a seismic decade. Excitement, danger, fear, exhilaration – that age had it all. Computer Age. Social revolution. Communications revolution. Ideology revolution. Space Race. Sexual liberation. Vietnam War. Assassinations in America. A mind-bender of unprecedented creativity and tension, threats and possibilities. Dualities of progress and destruction wherever you looked…
The diplomat clicks on a couple of favourite songs from the period to lighten his mood. While he’s listening, the Sun in the rear-view porthole shrinks to the size of a small coin. The spacecraft holds a steady course in a straight path away from the centre of the solar system. He doesn’t yet know where his pathway in space will take him in that vast void, but he thinks the computer will eventually inform him.
To take a mental break, he switches on a Nav Control Panel next to the computer. The following readings appear.
Velocity: 20,000 feet per second
Distance from Earth: 250 million nautical miles
Direction: Galactic North Pole
Date & Time: Time-free zone
Earth Clock: Click on Required Time Zone
Cabin Pressure in Command Module: 5 pounds per square inch (psi).
Safety and Comfort: High
Warnings: Living organisms may require medication for motion sickness
This latter reading gives the traveller pause. Is he still a living organism, or is he in a hybrid format? He seems to be a kind of transitional being. Since he doesn’t feel sick, he decides he doesn’t need any on-board medicine for motion sickness.
Svenson gazes out of the porthole. There again, a few inches away, is the void in which the Monarch is travelling. As there’s no friction out there, his vessel can move smoothly along in continuous motion, just like the planets and Moon in their timeless orbits, and just like the solar system itself moving around the Milky Way on the galactic plane, spearheaded by the Sun in a wave-like path forwards. He’s heading deeper and deeper into the galaxy. Inevitably, he’s on course to exit the Sun’s sphere of influence, having already got far beyond Earth’s pull.
It’s reassuring to know the computer is doing all the second-by-second mathematical calculations required for navigation.
Ayak looks for the search engine on the Nav panel. He reckons the system has a massive offline data store of knowledge and information which he can interrogate.
The passenger keys in the question: “What’s your name, please?”