Jones and the Big Jump

By Simon Poore

Jones embarks on a potentially lucrative and hazardous mission as part of the crew of an experimental space ship. His journey takes unexpected and dangerous twists as he is thrown back in time to 21st century Earth. Will he and the crew survive? How will he return to complete the mission? How is his fate inexorably connected to that of Katie, the flame haired archaeologist?

A short science fiction novella. Look out for more stories featuring Jones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Poore
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465863720

Simon Poore

A tall English writer...

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Jones and the Big Jump

By Simon Poore

Copyright 2011 Simon Poore

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Jones and the Big Jump

He took the moment to pick meat from his teeth; a plastic toothpick scraping and squeaking between his molars. His teeth were white and clean but not perfectly straight. Many people chose to cosmetically enhance their teeth and make them perfect, but Jones still preferred to keep his baseline imperfections, as if they were some kind of link to his past. It wasn't that he was averse to genetic enhancements, he had plenty of those. For example, he knew of no-one alive who knew his actual age, apart from himself. He looked about thirty-five and although most people lived enhanced long lives, he was actually much older than usual and he was one of the very few people left to have actually been born on Earth. Of course he didn't advertise this fact and mostly preferred not to reveal too much about himself. Most who met him thought he was an enigma, or that he was gruff or rude. But it suited him to not get too close to people…mostly.

Now though he was alone for the last few moments, before the big jump, and he knew he would have to be in close proximity to the other crew members for the rest of the mission. He tossed the toothpick into a nearby vac tube and stepped down from the soft hospital trolley. Pulling back the white plastic curtain he pulled the zipper of his immersion jump suit fully up to his neck and walked over to the support crew. The room was sterile and white and Jones' tight fitting suit matched it.

Masked attendants began attaching small pipes, monitors and nodes to the suit while Jones stood with his arms wide allowing their gloved hands to access to his body. Then he sat in the jump-chair while the attendants attached several umbilicals from the suit to the chair. The chair had a symbiotic relationship with its occupant; it was both life support and cocoon, supposedly protecting the occupant during the simultaneously infinite and instant stresses of the jump. Once attachment was complete, the chair enveloped Jones’ body with moulded plexiglas gel, and a white hood-like helmet descended over his head. Encased in the chair, he had little movement but he could activate controls with his fingers and he tested the voice control of the virtual HUD systems.

The chair was then mag-lifted into the corridor, and floated along next to three other identical chairs, each also occupied.

Jones could see through a porthole; the stars slowly revolving outside past the glass. Something far out in space was glinting and caught his eye. He realised it was one of the huge space telescopes that were constantly scanning the sky. There were several of these dotted around the solar system. They had two main purposes; one was to scan for potential new life-supporting planets in other solar systems. The other was to look for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. So far none had been detected.

The glint of the telescope was then obscured in his vision by the far side of the gate hub. This was a massive white spinning ring in space, inhabited by hundreds of scientists, engineers and potential colonists. The spin allowed for artificial gravity but also served to throw the controlled anti-matter/matter reaction into the centre of the hub. A jump ship would then pass through the reaction at its height, and was consequently thrown through the resulting wormhole across vast distances of space in virtually no time at all. The technology was pretty much tried and tested, although not without risk. So far jump gates had allowed three other systems to be colonised in deep space. Once the massive space telescopes had identified suitable systems, gate hubs were built to send colonists to inhabitable planets. For it to work reliably and large numbers of colonists and material to be shipped to different systems, gate hubs had to be set up on both sides of a jump. The tricky part was to send a ship on