The immense Soviet shuttle Bolshoi could lift almost a thousand tons to low earth orbit. Its brightness changed as it rotated end over end in the lethal sunlight. Luminescent white on top, a tennis-court-sized red flag on a great ogival delta wing, its underside a charred black hide.
Its destination was the wheel-shaped Great Circle international space station, which had taken a thousand Bolshoi launches to assemble.
In a nearby orbit, NASA was building its experimental nuclear cruiser, while ESA assembled the giant elements of its solar power array.
Japan had a Fifth Generation robot space factory, while China was attempting to leapfrog ahead by building the first moon city. India was preparing to launch a mysterious oval disk from Sri Lanka Spaceport.
Various corporations and non-profits operated dozens of smaller orbiting complexes and observatories. The universe roared electromagnetic static in all frequencies. The New Alliance was already listening for aliens.
Humanity had finally reached maturity. People used logical and programming terms in daily conversation. Ever subtler levels of coolness were being perfected. It was agreed this was the most interesting time in history. In fact, things would never get more interesting. Human competition was likely to end within a decade.
It was inevitable. The Master Plan demanded it.
The Plan had emerged spontaneously during the fourth decade of detente, combining the resolutions of the Great Party Congress, the RAND proposals, and the MIT/MITI project.
In January 2010, the Western and Communist computer networks had been linked for the first time. To prevent paranoid nightmares from coming true, all computers received a new core commandment, inalterably encoded at every level.
The Master Plan valued ethical survival above all. Stability came second.
Using the purest logic, it attempted to calculate the solution to every human problem. A series of compromises would result in inexorable progress.
After a few weeks, the Plan computers were already looking a millennium ahead.
It turned out that humans, or at least human-like beings, could survive forever while spreading across the universe, living human-like lives.
Of course they would have to be improved first. Immortality was merely the first step.
Eventually every human cell would become aware of its purpose, and ultimately every particle. The universe would be made of subatomic computers serving the Master Plan.
While still recognizable, future society would be immensely more advanced than it appeared. Man's descendants would be the surface layer. Destiny made real, they would live the most meaningful lives. Laboring in the background, the Plan computers would calculate every conceivable future, rejecting all but one. It had already begun.
Civilization would represent the highest refinement of awareness. In their austere academies and throne rooms, human descendants would ponder social paradoxes for centuries at a time, their answers illuminating infinitely deeper mathematical systems. Feuds would be rare but drawn out for ages.
When the universe perished a trillion years from now, Posthumanity might have advanced enough to create a better one. Distant civilizations had already set out on this path.
As the Plan looked further ahead, corporations formed to take advantage of its insights. In just a few weeks the international scene changed completely.
In Earth orbit, the opportunities were greatest. It was feared some space complexes might declare independence. Others might be too dangerous for the new order.
Two stations suspended operations. Officially, the crews expected to be recalled to Earth to receive the first cybernetic implants. In fact they appeared to be combining their stations into a powerful complex to stake a claim to the asteroid belt. They thought they were pioneers. Contingency plans were prepared, Special Forces put on alert.
This was the most dangerous time.
The Master Plan needed to stabilize mankind during its transition. It needed a distraction.
One option was to send America's nuclear space cruiser Ayn Rand to the newly discovered ice planet Aphelos, one light-week above the plane of the ecliptic.
Returning the crew to Earth would require all nations to cooperate to build a rescue ship. This might bring humanity together. Even stranger notions soon emerged.
The shuttle Bolshoi circularized its orbit by firing its ion thrusters, and maneuvered to deploy its payload.
Rumors that it carried the largest fusion bomb ever built, assembled from the redundant heavy hydrogen stocks of the world's remaining nuclear powers, were not quite true.
In fact, it was merely a tightly folded, spherical framework to contain the world's heavy hydrogen: a shell designed to precisely focus its detonation energy in one point of spacetime.
One million metric megatons of power might be enough to tear a hole in reality, if the energy could be maximally compressed by a Feynman-Witten InfraLens. The measured diameter of that self-healing rip, as revealed by patterns in the rebounding shockwave, would reveal the exact ratios between the elemental forces of nature.
These ratios could be written down as a very long number.
It was already known that that number contained a binary message.
Even the Hyperconducting-Hypercollider could only read the start of that message. There were hints of a strange alphabet, the top of a bitmap image that looked like a hand.
Floating at the center of the Great Wheel, the commander watched the station rotate around him. White-clad workers looked like angels below.
Outside, the shell slowly unfolded into a geodetic globe, like an immense digital simulation come to life. The glittering latticework seemed to trap the stars within it.
Nearby hung the nuclear cruiser that would transport the ensemble to the far side of the sun, where the detonation would occur. Every spare screen was filled with news, opinion, and slightly hysterical speculation, the birth pangs of a new era.
It looked like this might be a busy month.
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon
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