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(Page 1 of 8) A Newly Emergent Species by Phillip Hill
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The William Wallace launched thirty-two years after the perfection of the tunnel drive. Prior to W2 (as the crew called her) a handful of vessels had made interstellar voyages, but W2 was the first vessel specifically designed for long term missions.
W2's official mission was to map and catalog the star systems she visited, others could later choose which systems and planets deserved a further investment of resources. Unofficially, W2's mission was to search for any kind of life form. Humanity's previous baby steps into nearby space had turned up no life. Zip, zilch, nada. Everyone involved with the project understood that the official mission of mapping and cataloging was just a front, though a necessary one. If the W2's primary mission had been billed as a search for life forms and none were found, she would be labeled humanity's largest waste of resources since the Great Pyramids.
She was huge: a kilometer in length and one-fourth of a kilometer in diameter. She housed a crew of 15,000 men and women. Why so many? It was simply due to paranoia. This being our first real voyage into the galaxy (with all due respect to the first few ships which were little more than row boats) many on Earth were afraid we would come across an advanced alien race who would follow us home and reduce the planet to dust, or enslave the population and live like parasites on our thought waves, or any of a thousand other worst case scenarios conjured up by frightened individuals. So it was decided that if we were determined to explore, we might as well go armed. W2 carried thirteen thousand armed to the teeth, tough as nails, disciplined, clean-shaven warriors. It's a wonder all that testosterone didn't eat a hole through her hull.
W2 did not travel faster than light nor did she have to. Fusion power sources were used to help create an artificial black hole, warping space just enough so she could take a short cut from point A to point B. Artificial black holes had been created in laboratories for decades and had even made objects transit from one location to another, but nobody knew where the objects wound up, just that they were no longer "here".
Nobody knew where the objects wound up, until Fred that is. Fred showed us how to toss matter into the warped space surrounding an artificially created black hole and have it appear exactly where we wanted it to appear.
Fred was a self-programming quantum computer. Fred's root program allowed him to input specifications, such as a request for the most efficient shape of a butterfly's wing if the atmosphere were eight times as dense as Earth's, and then write a program producing the best design. Fred first wrote ten or so randomly varied programs based on common principles, then tested those designs for best results. Next, he would choose the program which produced the best result and randomly alter it ten different ways, testing and choosing the best result of those. Fred would then write more programs improving the design until he was satisfied he had achieved the best possible result.
Such a challenge would take a conventional computer an impossible amount of time to complete, but Fred spat out the answer instantaneously.
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