RING SHIP (Short SciFi Story)

RING SHIP
by Roger Born, Copyright 2004, USA

Long overdue. We should have discovered it decades ago, perhaps even a century ago, since we had been in space that long. We had put things out to the Lagrange points before, you know. Lagrange. Those imaginary but dusty Trojan points in the moon’s orbit that allow economical and stable satellite placement. But we discovered the ring ship by accident. One of our communication sats sort of banged into it. We found the alien ship when we went to retrieve our hardware.

The ring ship, (what else could anyone call it?), was there at the fifth point. Close up, it is a great hulk, and as black as space, It is nearly 3,500 meters across – a perfect ring, with about a three hundred meter square cross section. It is made mostly of iron with odd trace elements, – and it we later found it to be completely empty, and just sort of sitting at that Lagrange point, without spin or any other movement.

But what it was, and is, – at least to my mind, is an obvious thing, as it also is to most anyone who sees the computer enhanced photos of it. It is a starship, and the singular most elegant thing you might ever see in space, despite its great size.

Questions were naturally raised, especially when news of it got on the Net. People wanted to know who built it, and how long it had been there. Evidence from our oldest deep range photos and scans confirmed that it had been there at least since we went into space. It was just never noticed before, which is very odd indeed.

No one has a clue who built it, but there were many theories pushed forward at the beginning; all of them outlandish. People joked that it couldn’t have been left for any important reason, because it didn’t look like the Monolith. (ref: early space era 2D moving picture – from text reviews only – movie or photos no longer exist.)

At first, I really didn’t want to know who built it or put it there. I wanted to know why they parked it there for us to find. For finding it changed Everything!

When we arrived ourselves, we found that the empty ship had an access port on the inside of the ring, which was soon easy enough to discover. There was no door, nor cover at all. In fact there were no coverings for any of the openings throughout the ship. It was all open to space. None of the deck openings down below had ladders or stairs
of any sort. We had to contrive our own means of getting down and back up, as we explored it all.

There were twelve decks down inside, and with the floor of the ship, inside the outer edge of the ring making a thirteenth. It was calculated that the actual hull of the ship was nearly 20 meters thick. The decks were about twelve meters high, and since they each went completely around inside the ring, there were nearly a billion meters of deck space inside the ship!

As you know, we only discovered these facts slowly, as it took many months for anyone to agree how to proceed in the exploration of the ring ship. Once that was established, an armed party quickly went aboard, and immediately called for construction engineers to help them get down to the lower decks. It took us three years to explore it all, and to robotically catalog all of it with pictures, ultrasound and spectrography. People to this day are still employed in researching all the endlessly dull information we got from that first encounter.

I said the ring ship was completely empty, and it was. No furniture. No equipment. No writing or marking of any kind, on any of the walls or surfaces. Nothing at all. Every bit of it was bare to the walls, except at the lowest deck, where inside along the outer hull were found gigantic 100 meter long ingots of pure iron, spaced at perfect intervals. We found that there were sixty-three of them. It took us a decade to even guess their function, especially since there was no equipment attached to them, nor any evidence that there had ever been any there.

But, being a sociologist, I was more interested in what was happening with people because of the ring ship. The common man thought the discovery of an alien artifact was a good thing, but it hardly affected him at the beginning. Life for them went on pretty much as it always had, except now they had a new topic of conversation.

People who worked with the ring ship exhibited more profound changes, ranging from a change in life-style, to the seeking of religion, to an increasing hysteria. There was an inquiry, but nothing physical about the ship itself that could have caused these things to happen to people. It was simply the fact of its existence that moved, and
changed them.

Those who were most affected were the mathematicians and theorists, for they began to work incessantly toward uncovering the mystery of the ring ship’s propulsive systems. This was true all over the world, even for those who never actually saw the ring ship for themselves. Soon legions of men and women began training in advanced mathematics and physics, hoping to be the one who unlocked the mystery of the ages.

Most of them insisted that there had to be some sort of device buried somewhere in the ship, which would allow the ship to move. They also, the great majority of them, were certain that there must be several kinds of propulsion systems. One for close travel, and the other for travel in deep space. But try as all of us could, we who were there, nothing was ever found in the ship itself. It was like an empty canvas.

Like I said, its been twenty years since we discovered the ring ship, and I believe I know now why it came to our world. These are my own theories, of course, and I have no more proof for them than anyone else has for their own pet theories about the ring ship.

I believe it is a ship. That is the only possible purpose for its existence, in my opinion.

More than that, it is a ship for travel to the stars. Most of mankind believes this.

I do not think it is some ancient abandoned space station or orbital settlement.

Nor do I think it was it even built by man. The degree of micro meteor scaling of the outer surface makes it probably older than the existence of man himself.

I suppose any intelligent race may discover the things necessary to develop star travel, but if they are like us, they likely will never get around to it, considering the great cost and enormous global involvement.

Therefore, I think someone deliberately put the ring ship there for us to find.

Because any race that makes it into space, will discover or invent the universal mathematical understanding and technology necessary for star travel, IF they have incentive to do so.

And so we did.

The ring ship was put where it was with absolutely nothing concerning its purpose, it origins, nor even any clue about its means of travel.

I believe this was also deliberate.

For whoever put the ring ship there for us to find, did so in the best possible way. They gave us nothing, really, except the proof that such a ship can exist.

One other thing: The ring ship will forever change the world which discovers it.

Already, our world is putting war and poverty behind us, because of the free electrical power generation from the technology and progress that has come of our study of the ring ship. Not that the ring ship has any technology, but we invented it in our research of the craft.

It took nearly eighteen years to do it – to figure out the math, and to build the first drives. Those iron ingots were the key. Who knew their existence would point the way for the theorists? You know both the gravimetric drive and the star drive were created at the same time, almost to the same moment, by the independent groups researching them. All it took was the belief that it was something possible to do.

The ring ship gave us that.

Afterwards, it was easy to apply those drives to the ring ship itself. In early gravity drive tests the ship was easily and quickly moved from L5 into a high earth orbit. It was a most astounding thing to watch it move, for it operates on the removal of inertia, and its acceleration was instantaneous. Then the very first test of the star drive sent our test pilots around Neptune and back in a few minutes. I was there when they did it.

One of the benefits of these drives is the internal artificially generated gravity of the ship itself, which solves so many problems for us in its use. If we had to have relied on spinning the ring ship around its imaginary axis, travel in any direction would have been problematic.

The other benefit, which also is the blessing to all mankind, is the amazing amount of free electrical power that can be tapped from either of these drives. We finally and forever have freed our world from steam generated power, and its overuse of ever dwindling organic fuel sources.

Again, to me, the changes on the men of Earth were much more profound to me than all of these things.

The existence of the ring ship fundamentally changed the way man thought about himself and the universe. The concept of nations, and nationalism became obsolete almost overnight. After that, the nations fell, in almost a surreal and peaceful transition. Even those holdout governments who denied the reality of the whole thing could do nothing except capitulate before an ever growing and powerful world order.

The world government was formed, and one of its first duties was to direct the research, the funding, and the pay for huge bills the old governments expended in discovering the drives for the ring ship.

It second function was to write The Charter. If there were a confederation of worlds, or stars, or any other such government, we saw the need to first get our own house in order, so that we could address such a possibility as a united world – a world where all are free, and there is no need for caste, or greed, or poverty.

Since many corporations worked hard to find things to help the advancement of our understanding of the ring ship, the incredible inventions and discoveries they created became useful products that quickly became hot commodities on the open world market, and the whole world economy has prospered enormously as a result.

Today I could not imagine having to travel in one of our old style vehicles or space craft. Any mode of travel that is not inertia-free is considered to be dangerous and foolhardy. All of our advancements in this area came from the research of the ring ship.

But more than all of this, is that mankind now has a common goal, for the first time in history. It is an obvious one. We are going to become travelers among the stars. Man has always been an explorer, and now we are going to have the means to go where we want to go, and frankly, where we now need to go, considering how our growing population taxes our planet’s resources.

We are even going to use the ring ship to find its creators, hopefully to take our humble place among their advanced civilizations. At least, this is how I view our place in the universe. Time will tell if I am an incurable optimist or not.

Some still have a somewhat less optimistic view of the universe, and want to make the ring ship a war wagon. They see a need, and we have the means. The gravimetric drive is also a perfect force shield, and at the same time, a powerful weapon for applying force at a distance. We are well armed if we want to be, so we won’t be some babe-in-the-woods when we get Out There. But I think we will find the other worlds to be somewhat more peaceful than we have been – at least I hope they are.

Our stated goal is exploration, – and diplomacy, in case we do encounter life out there. I am afraid that in my occupation I have been spending many exhausting hours watching old entertainments, and reading outlandish and outdated books – the paper and print kind. There is a wealth of this kind of subject material, once called science fiction. This is all in an effort to understand what Man has already imagined to be out there. Some of the fictional stories are quite good. What I am gaining is not the knowledge of what is out there, of course, but what is in us that is capable of dealing with whatever we might find, and to discover what we might need to have along with us, when and if we do meet anyone else.

Therefore, we are all preparing. Our amazing diversity of endless supplies is almost aboard the ring ship. We are taking everything imaginable. There is plenty of room, after all. All of the decks are well lit and well manufactured spaces now. There is a breathable atmosphere and plenty of water. Every opening has been fitted with multiple pressure locks. A command center, and its redundancies, have been fitted with a multitude of viewers and sensors of everypossible description. We are taking quite a few factories with us, as well as every sort of hydroponics and crop stations. There are the animals too – a viable and complete zoo. The ring ship is becoming a small world. However, it can hardly be called full, even now. After all, we must have room for anything we bring back.

The study and advancement of Astrogation is big news. With all the fast coming inventions in this field, we believe we finally have the means of safely finding our way among the stars, so that we will not become lost from our home world. Even a journey of a few light years could cause us to lose our way, if we are not watchful and vigilant.

All that remains is for the world body to accept our advanced thinker’s recommendations of where to go first. Our first journey could take a decade or more, and cover a thousand light years – unless we find something so astounding that we must come back immediately to report it.

It has been a fast couple of decades, hasn’t it? We have learned so much, and our world has benefitted so well, just because of the ring ship existence. Man has invented his own star drive, and our own means of overcoming gravity. Man is also fixing up his Cradle too. Who knew we could do all that?

The ship is ready, and all the people are going aboard. There will be nearly ten thousand of us. We leave next week. But what about you? Have you decided? Are you going to go with us, or are you going to stay behind?