Soon after making his choice, the Voice of Invincible visits the space traveller again.
“Invincible, I wish to become part of the internal guidance centre of your newest solar space cities, please.”
“An adventurer! Good choice. But do you fear becoming a cosmic consciousness blended with the artificial intelligence of the on-board computer system?”
“I seem already to be some kind of consciousness and I like it. It’s timeless.”
“I see you’re happy in our medium. Training begins within hours.”
“Thank you, Invincible.”
Soon, Ayak begins receiving his solonaut instruction. The most complicated part is understanding how his soul will be integrated into the spaceship’s Central Instrument Unit (CIU), which will be packed with computers, gyroscopes and guidance and control technology. The CIU is designed to track distance travelled, velocity, altitude and any deviations from the programmed path, checking current position and flight conditions about every two seconds. It has a decision-making capacity beyond his own. He’s told he’ll be the commander, with the power to override the CIU in certain extreme circumstances, including being attacked in space, or putting down an internal rebellion in the space city. He’ll have a dashboard to monitor the CIU against a Master Plan and a two-way communication system.
“Will I be invisible?” he asks the computer training assistant guiding him through his computer-based training.
“Only to those still subject to three dimensions. You’ll be a fifth dimensional being sustained in the ecosystem of light.”
“Will I be able to see myself in a mirror?”
“There are no egos in heaven but, yes, you will have a definite shape, outline, form and appearance.”
“Will I see Athanasia again?”
“That only Invincible knows.”
Then Ayak is taught more about the Milky Way.
“Stars, planets, gas clouds, dust, black holes, dark matter and much more move around inside of our galaxy,” the training assistant explains. “Each object contributes to the net gravity of the galaxy, which keeps it all in balance. Our Sun speeds around the galactic centre and each galactic revolution only takes about 220–250 million years.”
“Only? And I thought I was old at 76 years!” Ayak chuckles, filled with eager anticipation about the aeons of exploration ahead.
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
Describing a journey from the ancient origins of humans to a time when we reach the other side of the speed of light necessarily has many sources of inspiration, literary, scientific and historical.
The novel begins and ends with science fiction sections.
Squeezed in-between are three documentary sections which tell the story of dramatic world firsts: the dropping of the first atom bomb, the first human spaceflight and the 1969 landing on the Moon. The five sections together share the themes of what I would call “power leaps”: changes in consciousness or technology, or both, which have enabled us to gain greater control of a common destiny.
The story begins about one million years ago at a time of great migrations leading eventually to the birth of humans. In the absence of any written records from the ancient past, it has always been a challenge to understand and reconstruct pre-history. Scattered fragments of evi-dence preserved in fossils, bones and ancient tools, as well as DNA traces they may reveal, are all there is to work on. Although the jig-saw puzzle of the time before human history has many missing pieces, painstaking study has clarified the broad outlines of our long and monumental race to become human.
The time-scales of the science of pre-history alone are daunting to conceptualise. South Africa, where I live, hosts some major paleoanthropological treasure-chests, the greatest of which is the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng.
For story-telling purposes, I was especially interested in the species of hominids which became tool-makers. They must have been creative and resourceful creatures. I was impressed as well by the vast migration paths followed by these fiercely independent ape-people. They spread out across the world from their birth-place in the grasslands of Africa.
As far as we can gather, Homo erectus was the brave, enterprising creature who first began migrating out of Africa, probably from about 1.8 million years ago. Hominids were ape-people considered to be the ancestors of human beings. The Collins English Dictionary defines a hominid as “any primate of the family Hominidae, which includes modern man (Homo sapiens) and the extinct precursors of man”.
I guess you could say they were transitional beings mid-way between human and “beast”. It was the Homo erectus group which adapted well enough to go on to become direct ancestors of Homo sapiens. They had brains about three-quarters the size of our modern brains. And they needed all the brain-power they possessed to survive against all odds.
Homo erectus used stone tools like handaxes and could even control the use of fire. They possessed a flexible set of survival skills which enabled them to adapt to cold, Northern climates once they’d migrated northwards across huge expanses of unknown terrain into what is now part of the continent of Europe. They were so adaptable that they eventually usurped the Neanderthals who’d lived in the cool northern hemisphere for centuries before them.
It was also about one million years ago when fire began to be controlled by the prehistoric ancestors of human beings. It’s amazing to think the ape-men managed to do that, in addition to using a variety of stone tools. As the story makes clear, it wasn’t humans who invented technology, it was hominids.
The novel’s second section leaps into the 20th century to illustrate that technological advances, without proper ethical governance, can unleash a Dark Force into the world. The science of splitting the atom was hijacked by the military[1] during the moral crisis of a world war to create a weapon of mass destruction. I describe in painful detail the terrible damage and loss of life resulting from the first atomic bomb. A human society had evolved capable of destroying itself. General Curtis “Old Iron Pants” LeMay, who was USAF Chief of Staff from 1961-1965, later admitted that if America had lost the Second World War, “we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
But, here’s the victim’s perspective:
Summing up this new existential threat to humanity, British Prime Minister Attlee wrote to President Truman on 8 August, 1945, “There is widespread anxiety as to whether the new power will be used to serve or to destroy civilisation.”
The atom bomb attack on Hiroshima brought a new word into the Japanese language: pikadon, from pika, meaning flash of bright light, and don for a big boom. Hiroshima’s “flashboom” is depicted in the second section in all its terror.
The event was a radical break in history. It shattered the old order, and its global patterns. Today, there are still over 10,000 nuclear warheads loaded and deployed. The Dark Force is not yet destroyed.
But then along came a brave young Russian cosmonaut with an engaging smile who inaugurated the Space Age which gives new hope for human destiny. His name was Yuri Gagarin and he was the first human space traveller. Although his achievement undoubtedly held a propaganda payload for the USSR during the early escalation of the Cold War, Vostok 1 was, in essence, a mission of science rather than a military conquest. And it was a lasting blessing to humanity that the Soviets chose as their original spaceman an aviator who was also poetic, a man of soul, integrity and culture, a man of the people with a perceptive human touch, a prince of adventure, an Everyman.
1
“A considerable fraction of the mass of the explosive charge, which may be uranium 235 or plutonium, is transformed into energy. Einstein’s equation, E= mc2, shows that matter that is transformed into energy may yield a total energy equivalent to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The significance of the equation is easily seen when one recalls that the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second.” The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – The Manhattan Engineer District of the United States Army, June 29, 1946.