Stowaways: Star Gate Leeches

The enormous energy requirements of a star gate mean that it should stay open for the least amount of time possible. (Plus, the less time you spend bending the universe to make these hyperspace bypasses, the better.)

That energy comes at a cost; most spaceliners time their trips together so that they can split the cost of using the gate. This complicates the coordination process, but it's much more economical.

(I imagine you might also have some connections to less popular destinations available only at high cost, or as part of a whip-back connection. Imagine the gate is scrunching space between Miami and Seattle, for instance. As the gate "closes", the space un-scrunches, and the destination end of the wormhole zips back to Miami. But if you want, you can stop it short in, say Denver, or even whip it around to Boston. You get a discount because the gate was already opened all the way across the country, and you're only paying for the redirection and pause in your destination of choice.)

Now comes the interesting part, however: leeches. Ships that don't want to pay to travel, or can't afford to, or need to fly incognito, or whatever. They wait for a ship (or group of ships) travelling to their desired destination, then try to fly in sync through the gate.

Neat trick, if it can be done, but it's made difficult by the fact that they're not part of the coordination effort, and don't know the planned rate of acceleration of the ships, or if the gate issues emergency commands, etc. It's all on secured channels between the ship (or ships) and the gate.

And remember, if you're a hair early or late in getting to the gate, your ship gets destroyed, or at the very least very damaged.

The legitimate ships, therefore, hate to discover an incoming leech. It basically means a close-proximity supernuclear bomb -- if the leech screws up, half it's engine core could end up in the destination with the legitimate ship.

The military won't tolerate leeches -- if they're headed for a star gate, you don't want to attempt a leech, because if they discover you, they'll blow you out of the sky. Plenty of emissary ships are armed for that purpose as well.

To better your odds of going unnoticed as a leech, you start farther back with greater acceleration. This also means a much, much more difficult timing effort. It's easier to time your gate-approach with another ship when you're just flying beside them. When you're 100 miles behind them, however, trying to choose your acceleration such that you'll pass through the gate at the exact moment they do -- well, it's trickier.

Of course, our hero doesn't have the money for proper gating. But his leeching is even more difficult, because he's flying manually.

Crazy little punk.

Wrong Way to Fly a Spaceship, Part III

There are a couple more things about piloting this way that I should mention.

1. You can still have an autopilot for long straight flights. Actual steering is only necessary when you're navigating that asteroid field or zipping through the city.
2. The interfaces in the cockpit aren't nice and pretty. There's no neat casing covering everything -- it's a mess of tubes and wires and improvised controls. Buttons don't match, levers don't match, etc
3. Nobody can steal your ship.

That last one is a bit misleading -- it's very difficult to steal a ship from its pilot anyway, because they're keyed to the minds of their pilots, and you'd be hard-pressed to forge a mind. When a ship changes pilots, the first pilot has to authorize the next one.

If the first pilot dies, there are some emergency protocols that can be used to reset the ship's computer, but even these are protected by passwords that the pilot will presumably only share with those he trusts.

Short of that option, you can rip out the memory of the computer altogether and put in a blank one, but that takes some serious time and effort -- the computer isn't just one chunk of circuits in one place -- it's throughout the ship.

But with the manually-controlled ship, nobody can steal it because a) it's not set up to receive pilots' implant transmissions, and b) nobody knows how to fly a ship manually. It's just not done.

Except in the case of our hero.

Wrong Way to Fly a Spaceship, Part II

So we've established that

1. Piloting a ship is so complex it requires cerebral implants,
2. Only adults can get implants, because their bodies are done growing, and
3. Our protagonist is not an adult.

It should go without saying that our hero will need a ship. And just for fun, we're not going to give him a pilot. That means that his choices are to either get implants despite his age (which might happen later on), or rig the ship for manual control.

I'm not sure yet how the rigging happens, but I doubt he does it himself. I'm imagining some mechanic/engineer friend hardwires systems for him, creating a bizarre cockpit that is insanely complex. Arms and legs have to be inserted into slots that grip them, with a host of controls in each slot that are manipulated by fingers as well as hand, arm, leg, and feet movements. The rest of him sits in a harness, with another mechanical extension that covers his head to give him sensory input.

In this way the ship becomes more of an extension of his own body.

The Wrong Way to Fly a Spaceship, Part I

In the Odyssey universe, space travel is through star gates -- man-made portals that open into other parts of the galaxy. But you still need a ship to get to the gate, which exerts such a powerful gravitic force in the moments that it's open that the only safe place to keep a gate is a nice, safe distance from your planet.

And it's only open for moments at a time -- a complex set of computations between both the ship's computer and the gate's allows the gate to open for the minimal amount of time necessary to let a speeding ship pass through. And it's not like a lightswitch; the gate has to cycle up to readiness, and that cycling time depends on the distance the wormhole is traversing.

If the timing were ever wrong -- well, then, you might pass through the gate unharmed before it opens, or you might miss the opening, or you might get chopped in half when it closes on you prematurely.

There are redundant systems, of course; buoys that mark the ship's passage and acceleration from a distance, abort switches that can cancel an opening almost instantly, etc.

But mostly, you are relying on the ship's computer to get you through safely. And generally that works out just fine.

Gate approaches aren't the only tricky party of astral navigation. A ship needs to accelerate at forces that exceed the tolerance of most beings, so inertial dampeners (to steal a term from Star Trek -- basically artificial gravity aimed in whatever direction you need it) need to compensate for the ship's movements. Like gates, however, these dampeners need a moment to reach a ready-state; the stronger the force being generated, the longer the cycle (though it's just a difference of milliseconds at this point). That means the ship needs to start dampening inertia before taking the turn.

HOWEVER. Since it's the pilot who is doing the turning, and since leaving inertia-dampening to the computer would mean a slower reaction time for all the pilot's commands--

(Pilot: "Go left!"
Ship: "Preparing to go left... cycling inertia dampeners... going left now!")

-- it is instead left to the pilot, who deftly maneuvers the ship and its internal gravity/inertia.

Which is why pilots use implants. All pilots. The human body has far too slow of reaction times to be able to handle this much, so the body is skipped altogether, and ships are controlled by pilots' minds directly. Cerebral implants transmit thought commands to the ship.

But cerebral implants can't be given to non-adults; their brains aren't done growing until their early 20s, and installing implants before the pilot has reached maturity is a sure-fire way to create a screwed-up kid AND a dangerous pilot.

But our hero needs to be able to fly a ship!

To be continued...

Main Character a teen?

So, perhaps it was reading Harry Potter 7 that did it to me, but I really got to thinking about making the main character a teenager. Late teens, like 18 or so.

EVERYbody does shows with main characters in their 20s and 30s. It's the prime of life; that's what we want to see.

Except it's not always, as evidenced by Harry Potter. Some young characters are far more exciting than older ones -- youth brings with it some inherent vulnerabilities -- and plenty of protagonists have been young. Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn, the Narnia kids, Ender, Rogue, Jim Hawkins... you get the picture. Their stories are often aimed at kids (with Ender being an exception, though I first read it when I was a teen), but remain exciting to adults as well.

Adventure has no minimum age requirement.

So I'm thinking a teenage boy may be the protagonist. I'd consider making it a girl, because then you've increased your vulnerabilities even more, but there's a terrible tendency to sexualize any teenage girl on TV. Plus, our TV adventures seem full of heroines -- Alias, Dark Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Claire in Heroes, and the upcoming remake of The Bionic Woman... it just seems that adventure favors women on TV. Why make a plain old adventure when you could make an adventure... WITH SEX!

So my main character will be a young man. Maybe even as young as sixteen.

Who is the antagonist?

Cylons. The Empire. Klingons. The Sentinels/Matrix. The Others. The Syndicate.

Gotta have some evil antagonist, right?

It's problematic -- all the evils in TV shows seem so black-hat, mustache-twirling. I think the real evil in the world is cleverly disguised in a variety of forms, and trying to pinpoint the WORST, and embody it in my show, is hard.

I thought of a growing empire that is species-ist, saying humans were the children of God, and oppressing other sentient species as a result. But growing Empires are hardly a real threat, in my mind; those who say the U.S. government is corrupt exhibit enough influence to change it. It's fun as a villain, in some ways, but we beat the Nazis, then the Soviet Union, and I don't see any country ever succeeding in conquering the Earth politically.

Oh, but corporate emperialism, they cry. Okay, so the corrupting influence of greedy corporations -- that's a force to be reckoned with. But again, we are reckoning with them. Plenty of organizations are fighting to raise awareness of sweatshop conditions supported by American corporations, or to fight environmental damage caused by companies that disregard the environment. It's still going on, but it's not anywhere near the most evil thing we have to deal with.

The greatest evil is that which is disguised as good, or that is invisible, and that slowly corrupts the souls of mankind. Not destroying the world, not enslaving other people... slaves can grow in humility and spirituality, and their masters inspire the masses to rally against such an obvious evil.

These evils will surely exist in my universe, and may serve as red herrings in stories where our characters are trying to root up some evil. But while they do damage to people, they don't necessarily corrupt those people.

Real evil corrupts but doesn't show its damage.

Now, the love of money is the root of all evil, so we have that to go on. Perhaps the growing tide of consumerism is it.

Or, consider the desensitizing effect of most media, which panders to baser desires for violence or sex. And even when it doesn't, it's often feeding individuals' desires to Escape. While the occasional diversion is, I think, healthy and needed, FULLY diverting into Escapism, and hungering for TV time or video-game time or whatnot is not.

The two work together nicely -- the media giants pushing more and more escapist entertainment at the populace in return for the money they love and crave.

But the good guys can't defeat the bad guys in one fell swoop. You can't throw the Emperor over the railing and restore peace to the Galaxy with this one.

Story-wise, I think our heroes are also following prophecies that talk about The Great Evil or somesuch, and hoping to fight it; for a long time, TV-wise -- multiple seasons? -- they pursue this. When they finally discover what the real evil is, they see they are powerless to fight it with violence as they have fought other evils, and they seem depressed. But they resolve to keep fighting anyway, The End.

Lost Tribes

Did I mention that the 10 Lost Tribes were abducted by aliens after being captured and taken from Israel? Yup! They sure were! A mass abduction to get some sturdy slaves.

So one guy our heroes run into is an Israelite of some lineage, whose passed-down history says they were born on the planet of the Messiah.

They then start tracing down his family history, trying to find his real roots. This may or may not lead to the information they need to pinpoint Earth.

Prophecies of Christ in the Odyssey Universe

At first, perhaps, we're not even sure whom Character X (somebody in the show -- I don't know who) is looking for. Maybe that's a mystery to be revealed later.

But the scriptures that Character X has say the following, among other things, about the Christ:

• He will be born on a dark world.
  
• He will never leave his home world.
  
• He will visit every world of men. (Contradictory? Sure seems like.)
  
• No man knows the hour of his coming.
  
• To none but those of his world will his coming be made known.
  
• Near the end of his life, he will suffer the sins of all, in order to redeem all mankind, and will then lay down his life. As he is the Son of God, he will have the power to die only when he so wills it.

A "dark world" is difficult to understand, but X imagines it to be a planet that is going apostate -- falling into disbelief. There are a number of candidates.
He also wonders if it's somehow a planet that doesn't orbit a star, and is thus in perpetual darkness -- someplace secretly colonized and powered self-sufficiently.
The answer, though, is that the dark world is a planet that emits no man-built E.M. waves -- no radio, etc. This is unheard of -- ALL planets have advanced technology.

He never leaves his home world during his mortal life.

He visits every world of men after his resurrection.

And while his birth-world's identity won't be made known, it could still be discovered by some. Or at least, that's what Character X believes.

What they don't know:

• He will be rejected by the world.
  
• He will be betrayed and slain.
  
• He will be resurrected.

Character X wants to find Him, and live under His reign of peace on a world devoid of sin. He can't imagine anything else would happen. He thought the Christ would live to a ripe old age, reigning in peace throughout His life, and at the end perform the sacrifice necessary to save mankind. To do so any sooner would be to rob us of His teachings.

Introduction to this "blog"

What I'm doing here, really, is posting my ideas for a Christian Science Fiction TV show.

Aaaaaaaand that's probably all you need to know.

Well, and this: it's not based on Earth, or in Earth's future, but in another portion of our Galaxy, in a different time.

Here's the opening explanation sequence... now, I know that opening credit sequences are somewhat passé, but I think you need one when your story takes place in a different world. Thus, Battlestar Galactica has an opening explanation sequence, but Lost does not.

Here's mine, so far.
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FADE IN:

Blackness. An empty void.

V.O.
In the beginning…

A sudden pinpoint of light, which explodes into a million rushing lights.

V.O.
God created the heavens…

A star, and coming into view, a planet with white clouds and blue waters, getting closer.

V.O.
…and the earths…

In an instant, a different star, a thousand light-years away. And another Earth-like planet in orbit.

Then another star, and its earth.

V.O.
And God created man in his own image…

On the planet’s surface, a FAMILY in rough clothes: father, mother, child. The father hits rocks together to light a small pile of wood.

V.O.
And God created man in new images…

And in an instant, another planet, where a hairy FOUR-LEGGED BEAST moves slowly through a grove. It stands on its hind legs, reaches for a purplish fruit, and bites into it--

Then another planet, where TINY ELFISH MEN move through grass as tall as themselves, trying to spear an enormous bug--

Then another planet, and beneath the sea, where the equivalent of a manta ray with arms holds a glowing globe, and a school of fish rushes towards him—

And another planet, with a growing village—

And another planet, with a towering city of strange architecture—

And another planet, with its continents lit by countless pinpoints of light, and an orbiting space station of enormous size…

TITLE: “ODYSSEY”
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So that's the universe -- created by God, but with a variety of sentient species. In general, this world -- now, I'm using the term "world" to describe the show's setting, not a single planet -- this world is a pretty good place, compared to Earth. There are conflicts, and there is a rising evil, but it's not as violent and terrible a place as Earth.

In terms of Sci-Fi, there's no Faster-Than-Light travel, at least at the start -- we're in a cluster of stars close enough together that travelling at 1 gee will get you to a neighbor in a couple weeks.

All the planets are advanced, technologically, with perhaps some spots of deliberately primitive lifestyle.

Christian theology is prominent throughout the Galaxy... but they don't think the Messiah has come yet, and they don't know where He'll be born. They have scriptures and prophecy of their own, however.