Antierra Manifesto – blog post #30

[begin blog post #30]

“May I continue with this story Doctor?”

The Doctor’s response is affirmative, even eager:  “I am certainly intrigued, Antierra.  Do continue.”

“According to Altarian research in the matter, and something I can vouch to be true from personal experience, when an ISSA dies, it vanishes, disappears, and there is no contact with those who remain in the vacated dimension.  Death is the process that separates the mind from the body and sends it automatically and without recourse into another dimension.  Few have ever been able to cross that barrier and contact the “dearly departed” and even when that has been claimed, the likelihood of the contactee being in fact the real “dead” person sought is astronomically small – perhaps nonexistent.  As an incarnate on Túat Har I have experimented with the process of contact with the so-called spirit of the dead.   I have made myself available to this experience but never have I been successfully contacted though I have been aware of such attempts being made by “someone” or “something” not of the current dimension I was in.

“To give an example. The psychic mind probe on astral travel seeking dear aunt Julie is wide open to spirit entities who sense the expectations found in the probe and can easily mimic the images.  Aunt Julie shows up, looks right, and says all the right things to the psychic who in turn relays them to the paying client.  But there is no Aunt Julie.  No secrets are shared.  The hidden cache of bonds or gold is not revealed.  Platitudes are exchanged.  Nothing more than expensive and time-wasting navel lint gathering, in my opinion.

“The only thing that is likely to happen is the essentially evil entity attaches itself to the psychic probe and, as a jump scout shuttle attached to a destroyer being “sheared” across a dimensional barrier makes the jump with it, the spirit entity jumps back into the psychic’s dimension and joins the growing host of ghosts, demons, spirits and other disembodied entities who haunt these worlds and seek bodies to inhabit and control.  These are not Avatari who can manifest material bodies from thought; these are failed lives driven by selfish and depraved desires.  Some of the more powerful of these failed lives manage to inveigle themselves into the minds of leaders, teachers, philosophers and engineers on various worlds…”

The doctor interrupts at that point to set me back on track.  “You were going to explain the small space ships we found free-floating in our space.”

“I am sorry to take such a round-about way to get there but yes doctor, I haven’t forgotten your initial question. 

“During the Melkiar invasions (there were a series of them) the USC lost thousands of their ‘jump scout’ crafts which they sent in convoy formations to attack the Melkiar ships.  When the Melkiars broke up a convoy and disabled some of the ships, they “fumigated” (killed all biological life on board) the captured ships and propelled these across various dimensions, not destroying them but saving them for some future and still unknown reason, perhaps simply because they were no longer a threat to them and they considered these crafts as having been liberated from their biological controllers and could now go on their merry way through infinite space, as relatives of the Melkiars, or as their children?

“Obviously some of those crafts were “pushed” into this dimension, where you found some free-floating in deep space and which Koron eventually appropriated to its own purposes to further its development of interplanetary space flight abilities, I presume?”

He nods affirmatively and smiles. 

“To make this part of the story more understandable, I’d like to explain about the USC’s propulsion system that can take physical objects across dimensional barriers.  The future of human survival, even on these stack or relative worlds, may depend on greater awareness of this process and consequences of its growing usage.”

“I’m much interested in that.  Please continue.”

“In one of those sorties, a wolf pack of thirty USC war craft engaged a Melkiar main ship who had just translated.  After a violent battle that claimed twelve USC crafts and all aboard, the remaining attackers were able to penetrate the Melkiar force-fields and disable their craft.  In a coup that will likely remain as the great heroic deeds of those wars, the USC troopers boarded the main ship destroying the Melkiars who became helpless when the central computer was blasted with controlled charges of singularity grenades.  The captured ship was taken back to a Federation space port and USC’s finest engineers were put to work on it to discover its drive properties, particularly their ability to just appear and disappear in colourful displays of lights resembling aurora borealis.  The question had always been: “Where do they come from and how do they just disappear without trace?”

“There were those who were convinced that Melkiar ships were able to “fold space.”  The now-famous Paul Shearing, a Leptan physicist who lived his entire life doing research and experimentation in low or zero-g space stations, was called in to study the Melkiar ship.

“Shearing, whose mind it is said functions more like an AI than a human, was able to identify the drive mechanism that caused these ships to vanish and reappear at will.  He experimented with smaller versions of that drive on a UTW craft, using insects and small animals to test his theory that no biological life would survive the “dimensional warping” effect of the drive.  He was correct.  All biology aboard the craft terminated.  After much additional research and re-design he was able to create a new drive as effective as that of the Melkiars but whose effects did not kill the biological occupants of the craft.

Pieta Olnava, a researcher-engineer in parallel worlds theory, a reincarnate who had been a political/religious prisoner killed in a prison camp in Túat Har’s North-East Coalition and partner in a triune marriage with Shearing, offered to take a test drive of the redesigned drive.  She successfully crossed a dimensional barrier in her small craft and returned it to its exact departure point. 

“The Shearing drive was perfected by the Shearing team, Paul, Olnava and Associates.   At first it was installed only on the larger UTW ships.  Great ovoid vessels called space arks were built and designed to accommodate a single gigantic Shearing drive mounted on their underside.  The vessels were sized to house tens of thousands of humans and entire cross-sections of lifeforms from worlds under attack, these remnants to be scattered throughout the then unknown space, hoping that some would escape the Melkiar devastation.

“Behemoth class warships of the USC were equipped with dual Shearing drives and auxiliary standard fusion drives and sent through dimensional barriers to intercept Melkiar ships, blowing them to smithereens when they announced their arrival with their typical light show.

“But that was still not enough to turn the tide.  The huge attached drives were cumbersome and useless in combat.  When not actually active, they were a drag upon auxiliary power systems.  Also they required maintenance which these ships’ crews could not perform under almost constant battle conditions.  If they were damaged in combat, the ships became sitting ducks to Melkiar attacks.

“Then came the revolution that would change the course of the greater galactic human movement.  The Shearing group invented a detachable drive with an x-ram configuration that would engage the ship and boost it into required velocity for the “shear effect” to take place.  Once the shear accomplished the ram pulled away to await the return of its ship, or any vessel equipped to accommodate the detachable x-ram drive.  These automated drives were also equipped with a devastating auto-defense system that would vaporize any unauthorized traffic, including unmanned missiles, entering its scanning field in over a hundred thousand kilometer radius.  Detached, the drives settled into preordained tight orbits around space station, moon, asteroid or whatever world to which it arrived, thus adding their awesome fire-power to the defense perimeter.  Once a ship had been propelled across the barrier it used its dual rear mounted standard fusion auxiliaries to function in physical (normal) space.  These are the same basic drives your “desert ship” is likely using.

“X-ram Shearing drives were installed and controlled by the USC in critical positions within any dimension the USC and UTW federations had ships, ready to propel crippled, retreating or returning ships to their home worlds or send new waves of destroyers and the behemoth planet crushers against the invaders.  Thus were the Melkiars defeated and the wars ended.

“That the Melkiars never caught on to what had happened says much about their computer mindset.  They were incapable of meeting new threats with instant decision-making.  They needed home-based direction.  They could not evolve or adapt to meet changing circumstances.  They could only increase their current efficiency linearly, as any computer does.  They could not alter the basic programming, could not evolve.  When the humans developed a superior drive, the Melkiars were defeated.  Another aspect of their faulty programming: it did not make allowances for retreat or surrender.  Once outmaneuvered or outmatched they could only stand, fight and be destroyed.

[end blog post #30]