Timelord

By J. Alan

Adventures, spaceships, time travel, romance, bits of the new era, some humor, and much more you'll find on the around three hundred pages of Timelord. You will meet Mac, a peaceful interstellar merchant turned against his will into a bold hero, along with the wise and beautiful Gracia, unexpected passenger aboard Mac's intelligent ship. Together they will travel through space and time, fighting against a cruel dictatorship in a space station, finding the secret of time travel and going back in time to the 20th and 21st centuries, meeting some aliens on their way and struggling to prevent a nuclear bomb terrorist attack.
Timelord is a very entertaining read for the upcoming vacation, and will probably give the reader something to think about as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Alan
• Release date: Jun 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463031391

J. Alan

J. Alan grew up in Ireland on a farm in the countryside of County Kildare. He started writing stories at a young age, sharing them with friends and family. At twelve years old, he emigrated with his parents to America, continued his studies there and began to develop his vocation as a musician and writer, publishing stories in independent newspapers and magazines.He currently resides in Tenerife, Canary Islands, where he works as a guitarist and singer, and finds time and peace to do what he likes the most: writing.

Book preview

Chapter 1 - WOUNDED

It was as if my brain reconnected little by little, one neuron at a time, making sure that each lobe worked properly before activating the next. While gradually regaining consciousness I noticed there were circuits that had not been connected yet, including memory, because I didn't remember anything. My identity awareness was present, but without memories, blank, and I wouldn't say that I didn't remember my name because I wasn't even aware of needing one. My body –if I still had a body, or had ever had one– refused to send me any sign of existence.

After what seemed an eternity, and when I was beginning to feel something like restlessness or impatience, an involuntary movement of my eyelids told me that I was able to open my eyes, and after some effort I could do it.

After the first dazzle, and as my pupils adjusted to the ambient light of wherever I was, the first thing I saw was the ceiling, white, luminescent, which led me to think that I was in a horizontal position. Slowly, while my brain laboriously tried to recover its normal functioning, I began to try to explore what could be under that ceiling, when I heard the voice:

Well, buddy, it’s about time! I started your reconnection more than five minutes ago, but you just kept sleeping like a log. Hell of a sleepyhead!

A cheerful and friendly voice. While I was listening, I managed to focus its origin, and it turned out to be a smiling young man with a shaved head, wearing a health technician uniform. He shared his attention between me and the monitor of a healing unit, stroking the controls with gentle care, while continuing to say:

Please don’t ‘ya get mad with me because I woke you up. Honestly, I would let you rest a bit longer, though your regeneration time is over. To be honest, I’m inclined to let people sleep the most they can, especially myself, he chuckled, but out there is someone who wants to ask you some questions, and so...

At that point I decided to make a conversation out of his monologue, and finding in my throat something similar to my voice I asked, between coughs:

But, I... what... what happened? I mean, what am I doing here?

My question was not an example of lucidity, I admit, but I didn’t feel lucid enough yet. Anyway, I got an answer from my head-shaven interlocutor:

Oh, come on, don’t you remember? Well, you’ll do it, when you get fully awake. The only thing I can tell you is that you arrived here two days ago unconscious, with very little blood in your body and, so to speak, a bit dissociated: you on a stretcher and your right arm in an ice box. Suddenly horrified I looked at the mentioned limb: it was where it should have been. But don’t worry, my friend. That device you see around your biceps glued it back in place, so to say; a few more hours and it’ll be like brand new, I promise.

The shock this revelation caused me bristled the hairs on my nape and finished waking me up. I was never very good at the subject of physical suffering, and to imagine myself separated from my beloved arm was quite disturbing. However, I didn’t feel any pain or discomfort, even when, cautiously, I checked the normal functioning of my hand and fingers. Anyway, I wanted to make sure:

And... Tell me please, will it be all right? Will I have any problem using my arm, or something...?

No way. Brand-new, trust me! It was a clean cut, with a laser. Almost nothing to regenerate. Anyway, even with this old machine I could make your whole arm grow new again, though it would take some months... Well, gotta go. Can’t spend my whole day pampering you, buddy. Besides, there’s somebody out there waiting for me to say that you’re in your right mind to get in, so you won’t complain about not having anybody to talk with. I’ll come back in the morning, and I hope that by then you will be recovered enough so I can kick you out of here. I think you won’t cry, will ya? Well, bye-bye. Oh, by the way, my name is Sabo, they call me Rusty after my beautiful red mane, see? He laughed, amused, rubbing his shaved head. Anything you need, just shout, okay?

And without giving me the chance to say or ask anything else, ‘Rusty’ got out and close the door. Certainly, the guy had red eyebrows, so I think he got the right nickname.

My thoughts began to wander towards the circumstances that had brought me to that situation, which I was beginning to remember, when the door opened again to give way to a woman soberly dressed, not old, nor young, neither beautiful nor ugly, with a charming smile and a pair of big grey eyes, who introduced herself:

Hi, hero. My name is Atisha Miyonik, and I am a Detective Officer of this Station. But don’t worry, all the incident is pretty clear: I’m here just to fill some blanks in all this.

Very pleased to meet you, Officer. I answered. Though I’m afraid that my memory isn’t totally recovered yet, I will do the best I can to serve you well.

Dear stars, how polite! She smiled, while bringing closer to my bed what it seemed to be the only chair in the room. Then she sat down and said:

I had heard about the proverbial courtesy of the Ancients, but I never had the opportunity to witness it myself. Lately the good manners are a bit scarce...

To tell the truth, I never really liked being called an Ancient, I smiled back. After all, I’m not that old!

Certainly not: according to the record, you are thirty-six years old, isn’t that right? And your name is...

The age is correct, I interrupted. But about my name, I’d rather not talk about, I never liked it. Everybody calls me Mac, even my trade name is also M.A.C.

Yes, that’s here as well, and it’s official, she said, consulting her records. And if you don’t like your original name I don’t need to break the hospitality rules bothering you with that, said the officer, unable to restrain a chuckle about my reaction to the matter of my name. For a moment I felt a bit embarrassed.

Well, but just to fill the forms, please confirm that you are Space Treater by profession, licence issued in Athena, series One, A-category, number Alpha 31... a very low number, isn’t it? to everything she said, I nodded. Your birthplace is planet Earth, solar system 1, wow, you’re a patriarch of Humankind indeed! to this, I faintly smiled. And your birthdate is... oh, well, this must be wrong, obviously...

It’s correct, I confirmed tiredly because I knew what was coming. Twenty-ninth of June two thousand thirty-seven, according to Earth’s chronology.

Her beautiful grey eyes opened very wide, and only after a few seconds she could say:

But that means... something like eight hundred...

Eight hundred and eighty-two years, to be exact. You know, the interstellar trips, the time-slide...

Yes, the space-time relativity, and all that, but I’d never have guessed that it could mean that much...

Relative time-shift, I helped her. But you see, I work hard, I take very few and very short holidays, and that’s the result.

But you don’t look so bad to be nearly millenarian, the officer laughed. You don’t even look like being thirty, and at the same time you are one of the oldest Ancients, isn’t that true?

Well, yes, I think so. But let’s stop talking about age, otherwise I’ll have to ask yours...

Eighty-two, and well lived, young man, she smiled.

Wow, but you don’t look even half that age, and I'm not trying to flatter you!

Thank you, but that’s my age, and I’m planning to live at least until the two hundred. The advances of the bio-energetic science, you know. Actually, you can have a similar life expectancy, provided you take good care and stay away from troubles like the one that brought you here... and now, while we’re at it, tell me, what’s your version of the events?

Well, you know, I was sitting there, taking care of my drink and watching through the bay window the manoeuvres of the ships in the inner dock, when that blond girl came to me and...

Ravenna Sallerz, social service prostitute number R-233, interrupted Atisha.

Whatever, I didn’t ask her the name nor the number, I chuckled. She came to me and began offering her services, which I turned down. Nevertheless, we had a little chat, and then that bearded drunk man showed up...

Ileius Zanith, explorer miner, recited her. But he wasn’t drunk, but stoned with ‘blast’, an illegal drug.

Drunk or stoned, he didn’t seem to be in his right mind. He began insulting me because, as far as I could understand, he was convinced that I was trying to steal his girlfriend. I just ignored him completely, then he grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her brutally, knocking her down from her chair and dragging her through the floor a few yards. And when he began to kick the girl’s head, I decided to intervene, and...

And you demanded that he stop hitting the woman, said the officer, always checking her records.

Well, to tell the truth, it didn’t happen exactly that way.

That’s what the witnesses declared. What did you do?

I told him to leave her alone, yes, but first attracted his attention with a good punch to his ear.

What happened after?

Well, he seemed to agree. Stopped kicking her and began beating me, or at least trying to. Listen, I’m a very peaceful person, but when I see that somebody four inches taller than me, and outweighing me for about seventy pounds is determined to rip me to pieces, I fight back the way I can. And I did. With the chairs, jars, tables, everything I could find there. I think we made such a good mess in that bar. But no way, he knocked me off, and I can’t remember anything else until I woke up here, a short while ago.

Then let me complete the picture, said the woman. When the police patrol alerted by the disturbance alarm got there, they found Zanith trying to dismember you with a laser knife. He’d already cut your arm off, when officer McNam paralysed him with his weapon.

Son of a b... it just slipped out, Sorry, I didn’t mind to...

Don’t apologize, son, the language we hear every day at my job isn’t precisely the finest, she laughed. Ileius Zanith is already hospitalized in the Mental Recovery Institute, and let’s hope for the best when he gets out of there. And you’re almost totally recovered, as the medical engineer told me, so there are no major consequences of the incident. But I would like to ask you, the next time you see a damsel in distress, Mr. Knight, you’d better leave the feats to the accredited and better qualified staff, I must say.

Don’t worry, that’s what I’ll try to do, officer, thank you.

Okay, but please, let’s skip the formalities, man, she smiled. Because right now I was thinking about inviting you to dinner tomorrow, when you get out of here...

Well, look at the cheeky officer, I thought. I imagined the woman had in mind to have some kind of affair with me. Though she wasn’t ill-favoured, I was far from even thinking about love affairs at that time, and I was trying to find a good enough excuse to decline the invitation when she, after a deliberate pause, continued:

... so I would be able to introduce you to my husband and family, it would be a great privilege for them to meet an Ancient in person. You won’t deny me that pleasure, will you? she finished, giggling.

Er... uh... Of course, it will be my privilege, thanks very much. I’ll be there, I promise, I accepted, embarrassed once again.

Still smiling in amusement my new friend stood up, and on her way to the door, she said:

Not good to abuse the convalescents. Thanks for your time, and don’t forget, you have an appointment tomorrow. Bye! and with one more smile, she was gone.

Alone at last, me and my arm. Suddenly, that limb was of a greater importance, just because I’ve almost lost it. It was my prodigal arm now.

I made myself ready to sleep, considering that until the next morning I wouldn’t have many more options. I closed my eyes and started relaxing slowly, and my thoughts began to wander...

Chapter 2 - MEMORIES

What a curious thing time is. I am thirty-six years old, according to the time measuring of old Earth, that all Humanity continues to use no matter in what lost corner of the Galaxy they are. But since the Earth year of two thousand and thirty-seven in which I was born, eight hundred and eighty-two years have passed in this universe! That is, I am still alive in the Thirtieth century, having been born in the Twenty-First century, and if I had stayed still on my planet, I would already be at some far-off reincarnation, or perhaps even at another stage of existence.

I understand the perplexity of Officer Miyonik at this, because even I, despite accepting it as a matter of fact, feel a chill every time I think about it. My human nature, linear and finite, rebels totally, but has no choice but to surrender to the light of facts. My life is what it is, and stranger things are seen in this universe.

Although seen through the cold eye of science, it is perfectly understandable: travelling at speeds close to that of light, time slows down considerably for the voyager. In theory, at the very speed of light, time would stop completely, so someone taking a round trip at that speed to, say, the Gandhi quadrant, 220 light years from the old and beloved Solar System 1, would return in what for him would have been only a second, only to find instead that on Earth it has been four hundred and forty years! My trade involves many interstellar trips, and at the speed that I travel a journey of a hundred light years means a few days for me on board my spaceship, but in the static universe it's still a hundred years. It is difficult to keep friends in this profession.

Obviously I haven’t spent all my life in this trade, only the last fourteen years. My last fourteen years, which have meant more than eight centuries in the static universe.

My first year as a space traveller was spent in hibernation, suspended animation or whatever you want to call it –those techniques have varied a lot since then–. But what it meant in my biological time eleven months and little more, was the historic first colonising expedition to Athena, the second planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri, which lasted seventy-five years of Earth time. I remember the tremendous expectation that our crusade aroused worldwide. No wonder, it was the first time we Earthlings travelled beyond the Solar System 1.

Those were the first times of the nuclear impeller, which allowed much higher speed than the already obsolete chemical engines. Once the problems of fuel storage were solved, the huge plasma reactors transported us at a speed of .05 C, that is, five percent of the speed of light; for the time we are talking about, it was an astounding velocity.

But our crusade ended in what seemed a joke. Almost ten years after our departure, SAI –Sondai Astronautic Industries, an ancient terrestrial corporation–, developed the ‘synchro-impulsion system’, also called ‘synchro-drive’, which is still used today, and which allows speeds up to .98 C. Result: with that drive the Earthlings arrived at Athena –and several other places–, explored to the last corner of the blessed planet, colonized it, and industrialized the new raw materials more than fifty years before the scheduled date of our arrival. Meanwhile, we, the supposed pioneers, slept in deep space.

We were like a decorative ornament in space, until they got bored with waiting for us and decided to go and wake us up five years earlier than planned. They took us to Athena, and it turned out that we, the Colonisers, with our fatigues and all our exploration equipment, had difficulties finding accommodation in the luxurious, long ago built hotels.

But, gee, we were heroes anyway, so come on, guys, choose whatever you want! First on the list for everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything: luxuries, amusements, hierarchical positions –generally sinecures, because we didn’t know how to do anything in that new universe–, professions, etc.

I tried to have fun for a while, as befits every fairly grateful hero. I did my best to adapt to that new planet and integrate myself in its friendly and optimistic population, but eventually I had to give up: the ghosts and the pain had not disappeared yet.

Because I didn’t sign up for the Athena project because I was an aspiring hero. I did it because I could no longer bear to continue my life in places that reminded me so much of all that I had lost forever.

I didn’t want to be an adventurer. Although I was in the Air Force and in the Space Program –Communication sector–, it was not because I was seeking thrills, but to ensure myself a future in a good profession, well-paid, and which I liked enough.

I was happy. At twenty-one, I had my life resolved. I loved Cynthia, we would get married soon. My parents approved that decision, and my sister Carla had begun to accept it –she was very jealous of her idol, her older brother, that was me–. We were a great happy family, and my future was full of bliss and security.

But then came the idea of celebrating New Year’s Eve together in the Hotel Akira –no matter what it costs, we deserve it, said Dad–, to announce the date of our marriage to family and friends. Hurrah, gifts, good news and fireworks for everyone! Happy New Year!

And just that night someone who was on duty in charge of the central computer of the Air Force Base suffered cardiac arrest or something, and despite how much I protested, they cancelled my permit and sent me to relieve. I still remember how frustrated and impotent I felt then, and it is easy to imagine: that was supposed to be the most important night of my life, and by an unfair play of fate I was going to be deprived of it. I set out to stir up heaven and earth to find a relief, and by then, when I was determined to do something, it was difficult to make me desist.

On New Year’s Eve it was very hard to get free from a guard shift, because everyone in the Air Force wanted their permits for that night. My rank was not very high, so it was not easy to put pressure on anyone to achieve my purpose, but finally, after much pleading, implore, promise extra shifts and others, I got the captain himself to come relieve me; anyway, the poor man had been widowed that year, and was not in the mood for parties.

I call home euphoric and say: Never mind, I’m a little late but I’ll be there, start without me. When the captain arrives, a few more entreaties and, given the circumstances, they grant me a personal transport for that night. I take off my uniform, put on the new suit I had bought for that occasion, and full of anxiety I leave full speed towards the hotel, a luxurious complex on the outskirts of the city.

And when I get to the access road, and I am a little less than a mile away from that majestically and brightly lit building that enclosed all my past, present and future happiness, a frightful explosion cuts it in half, and to my absolute horror I see the whole building completely collapsing, crushing forever my whole life right at midnight.

In the hospital where I was recovering from the shock I got to know what had happened, that damn terrorist madman who blew up the nuclear micro-bomb that was tied to his body, in the name of I don’t know what separatist group protesting against the World Central Government. At least my loved ones –absolutely everyone, Cynthia, my family, my friends, all of them– didn’t even notice, because that nutty decided to blow himself up in the middle of the party hall, a few meters from my family and without warning. The police found out how he had done this atrocity over a delayed message that the demented left on the global communication network.

Only I remained to suffer all my loss, to execrate the crazy fanatic and his group, and to curse the guard duty that had prevented me from being there that night, so at least I would have died along with them all, and thus suffering no more sorrow.

I remember those weeks at the hospital like a nebula of pain, believing that the only way to put an end to that was to kill myself. Despite all the sedatives and the constant care they lavished on me, I couldn’t avoid constantly seeing the ghosts of my beloved ones. I kept turning around in my mind searching for consolation somewhere, but there was nobody who could give me any: whoever I thought of, had vanished. The world was full of strangers, with only one gesture fate had erased everyone I loved.

When I left the hospital, on the advice of the doctors who treated me, I tried to rebuild my life. I sold my parent’s house and went away from there, renting a small flat near to the Air Force base. I went back to work, tried to distract myself, but all was in vain. Every step I took, every place I saw, everything I did, reminded me of how much I had lost, the memory of fragments of what had been my previous life was tied to every place, to every routine act, to every smell of my city. In the few moments when I could distract my mind in some different matter, something always appeared, a street, a building, even a cloud, that was associated with some of my beloved ones, and the pain slapped me in the face again, the anguish in my throat and heart oppressed me again. Unbelievable, almost fifteen years ago for me, not counting the almost eight and a half centuries of static time that had passed since then, and I still cry with the memory.

When I decided that I couldn’t continue living that way, and that the only solution –apart from the still not totally ruled out suicide– was to get away from there, I learned fortuitously that the list of volunteers for the Athena project was still open, and I enrolled. Fortuitously, they needed a communications’ technician, but the ones in my profession were not very fond of adventures, and there were none, except me, who wanted to take risks in the conquest of space and was also willing to depart forever from everything. I didn’t have difficulties to be admitted. Anyway, four months of specific learning and intensive training, one month of tests, and one year sleeping. When I woke up, I was already a hero.

So, as I was saying, time is a strange thing: when I got bored with not being able to distract myself in Athena and decided to start this life of Treater –Interstellar Independent Merchant, according to my licence–, in my conscious time had been passed little more than seven months since the Akira incident, but on Earth not even the memory remained: more than seventy-five years!

So then, to make a long story short, I went to the recently created ‘Institute For The Reintegration Into Society Of The Honourable Pioneers Of The First Athena Expedition’, a high-sounding name for a small office with two social technicians whose main duty was to make sure that we could get anything we wanted. I had no problems getting the required hypnopaedic courses to learn everything that’s needed to be a proper Space Treater, and once it was done –it was very easy, the only thing one has to do with a sleep-learning course is to sleep–, they gave me the licence, an ‘Intelligent Synchro-impelled Space Ship’, all the necessary equipment and an initial capital of several thousand credits. That was all, there I was, an expert and prosperous Treater, with no one single transaction made yet, and nothing done to deserve it apart from having slept three-quarters of a century.

Why did I choose to be a Space Treater? I don’t know exactly. I guess that back then in Athena, I still wanted to escape from my past, and there’s no better way to flee away from everything than to move across time and space, because you can’t go back anywhere: when you are back somewhere, nothing is the same at all. Along the years, I got used to this lonely life, with the sole company of Silverbull, my spaceship.

But it wasn’t wrong to choose this job. My old profession as a communications’ technician was obsolete, because the Artificial Intelligences had been since then already in charge of all that without human help. Nowadays, most of the work is planned and done by the intelligent machines, and the Space Treater activity is among the few lasting ones still meaning a challenge to human intelligence and creativity. It needs initiative, knowledge of the trade and a good intuition, to know what to buy somewhere and find where it will be needed and saleable when you get there, in the future. It takes many calculations, to know a good deal of Relative History, and to anticipate the space stations and planets’ condition in the future, to take the right merchandise to the right place at the right time. And though the A.I. –Artificial Intelligence– of Silverbull is first-class and a very good help, I am the decision maker, and my intuition has the last word. And until now, honestly, it hasn’t been going bad at all.

When on board, I work updating the information about the commerce conditions of the different human colonies, and based on that I plan my route and my business. I play multi-chess with Silverbull, regularly use my small gym, sometimes I read. I have a huge music collection, but most of the time I choose old rock & roll and ballads from the Twentieth century to listen, a musical taste I inherited from my mother’s father, my favourite grandad. You see, I am an Ancient...

When at the Space Stations, I talk business with the merchants, science with the scientists and poetry with the poets, but I never talk about me. Though I drink very little, I like to frequent the bars: there is possible to find somebody to talk with, and these are never repeated meetings. I rarely talk twice with the same person, I try to avoid it.

Sometimes, a woman. A bit of human warmth, some sex, a little consolation, and goodbye again. I don’t like prostitutes, that’s only sex, nothing else. And even less I like the virtual substitutes, I loathe them. I never understood how somebody could have sex with a computer. But once again, I’m an Ancient.

To be brief, I am not sure it’s a good life, but I couldn’t live differently. I can’t have my beloved ones back, and I don’t want new relationships, they couldn’t replace them. Neither I would be able to stay in the same place in the static universe, and watch my neighbours live the life I can’t live. Call me envious, but I like my life this way: when I leave a Station, I know that the people I saw there will not exist anymore when I eventually come back, and it’s better that way, so then my memories of that place are only superficial, none deep. Because deep memories hurt...

The only people I meet again occasionally are other Treaters like me. It's not frequent, but sometimes it happens. We are the only ‘long living,’ as they call us sometimes around there. A woman asked me not long ago:

Don’t you get bored with living that long?

And she was five bio-years older than me. How to explain it to her?

Chapter 3 - SILVERBULL

From the mirror, someone was looking at me who was not exactly me, at least not the one I was used to seeing. I thought it would be an effect of the lighting, and then I neared the looking glass to examine myself carefully: the dark circles under my eyes were gone, my cheeks were fuller, and I missed some wrinkles that I had already accepted as part of the landscape of my face.

I finished getting dressed and got out the bathroom back to what had been my convalescence room, where ‘Rusty’ Sabo was switching off and packing his machines.

It’s a normal procedure nowadays, said my healer, when I consulted him about what I had found in the mirror. Generally, a genetic renewal is an aesthetic treatment, and it’s not done for free, but in your case it was inevitable: it had to be done to make your system compatible with the new blood that we had to give you, and it also facilitates organic regeneration, like the one we did on your arm. Side effect, general physical regeneration.

Excuse me, I didn’t understand well, I said, somewhat confused, are we talking about... rejuvenation?

Well, it’s something like that, in other words, Sabo said. These machines reprogram your genetic code to how it was in the beginning of your adulthood. This, as you can understand, greatly favours the healing and regeneration processes. As your cells are renewed, you will notice more changes: wrinkles will disappear, also those premature grey hairs, and you will begin to feel more energetic and vital.

I already feel that way, really, I observed. But I’d believe that the process of rejuvenation involved long and complicated bio-chemical treatments, with strange drugs and I don’t know how many more things. How is it that they now do it with machines, and in such a short time?

Freaking galaxies! Rusty laughed. How long since you took any interest in medicine for the last time, buddy?

Some centuries, I must admit...

You are a little behind the times, I see. Yes, you’re right, in the old days t’was that way, chemicals, unstable drugs, it used to take a long time and it wasn’t pretty safe. But a long time before I was born, they developed the biological interface, and that’s why these machines can reprogram the human genome, just as it was another computer.

Very interesting, I said reflectively. So, eventually the Humanity found the Fountain of Eternal Youth?

Well, something alike, smiled my friend. But it’s not really eternal. You can stretch your lifetime to the double or more, and in very good shape all the time till the end. But Death comes anyway, sooner or later. Don’t ask me why, I’m only a tech, ask the mystics...

When I was finally ready to go I said goodbye to Rusty, who asked me to pledge to return for a final revision before my departure, and leaving the health care unit I resolved to get up to date with my business.

The first thing to do was to go to the docks where Silverbull was moored and verify the correct arrival of the goods I had bought. So I went to the nearest transport bay, and wondering if I should take the fast tube or the panoramic train, I selected the latter. I wasn’t really in a hurry and hadn’t seen much of the Station yet, so I prepared myself to enjoy the landscape while planning about the last things I had to do there.

Space Stations are every time bigger, they are like living beings in constant development, as the Humans build every new one bigger than the one before. They still keep the name ‘station’ though they are real human colonies, like miniature worlds with hundreds of thousands –sometimes millions– inhabitants.

This one I was visiting, Hemingway VI, was three hundred miles wide, with the most traditional and usual wheel-shaped design which allows to get the easiest and cheapest way of artificial gravity. It’s located orbiting Kappa 17, a star near the Pleiades –known as the Seven Sisters, M45 for the astronomers– in the Taurus quadrant, about 450 light-years far from the old Solar System 1.

Why a Space Station? Very simple. The exploitable planets, where the Humans get the raw materials from to turn them into everything they need for survival, generally are not habitable. They have too much or too less gravity, their atmosphere is often lethal –or don’t have any at all– or their surface temperature is not suitable at all with our form of life. It would be too difficult, expensive and dangerous to fight those conditions to build habitable planetary settlements, and it’s definitely more practical to build them in the vacuum, in outer space.

Anyway, we need as well zero-gravity for many of the industries, and the lack of atmosphere and the very low temperatures in outer-space are very valuable tools for nowadays science and technology, and out there all of this is for free.

Therefore, things had taken an odd turn: the Humans are not any more terrestrial or planetary animals, the vast majority of the Humanity lives nowadays in the Stations scattered through the Galaxy. The Son of Mother Earth is now a spatial creature, and most of the humans, I dare to say, get born, live and die in outer space without ever stepping on a planet in their lives. That’s why an Ancient like me, who had lived twenty-one years on Earth, and later six more months on another planet, Athena, is a rarity.

The panoramic train travelled slowly, at a perfect speed to appreciate the landscape without missing many details. I wonder at the fact that the Human Being, despite never having been on Mother Earth, tries to imitate it anywhere he goes. Using Holographic techniques, there they had created the almost perfect illusion of a blue sky with scattered little white clouds, and a shiny yellowish sun worked as the main source of light. The simulated horizon was quite good, considering that the train was travelling through a tube arched ‘upwards’, according to the centrifugal gravity force. I was only missing that feeling of vastness and deepness that I had experienced in my planet. Apart from that, it was an acceptable simulation, better enough than in other Stations.

Finally, we reached the commercial docks’ area, and leaving the train I went to Nº 21, the one hosting my old friend Silverbull. After passing the triple identification control, retina, fingerprints and DNA reading, the door allowed me to get into the locks’ zone, and through the boarding tube I reached the inside of Silverbull, who greeted me:

Hello, Mac. Welcome aboard, captain.

Hi, Silver. Everything’s fine?

Perfectly, Mac. Cargo complete and verified. Payments done according to instructions. Structural and functional check done, repairs not needed. Human supplies updated, now having a newly designed protein generator, smaller and with better energy usage than the former one, generation capacity 68% higher. I’m going to feed you better now, boss, said the ship in its warm voice.

Thanks, chum. Did you miss me?

Yes, indeed, Mac. I got noticed about your little accident... fully recovered, I hope?

Better than ever, Silver, thank you. How did you find it out?

Easy. You were late, I searched the Hemingway VI’s communications network for info. From there I was sent to the police net, and then to the health care unit. I stayed connected with that A.I. until I make sure of your complete recovery.

I couldn’t avoid a feeling of gratefulness towards that artificial being, despite knowing for certain that looking after me was just part of its programming. After all, is always nice to know that somebody cares.

Well, thank you once again, Silver, I said. Do you know you have a younger boss now?

"I think those new bio-techniques would