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.