The Threshold of the Universe

By Bryan Whelan

After the recent death of her husband, Maya Edwards suddenly found herself the Commander of the world's most advanced spaceship. Using the new Space Fold technology, it could jump billions of light years in a matter of seconds. Their journey was the most audacious one ever conceived. To travel to the edge of the universe and cross the threshold that astronomers believed marked the end of known space!

Could Maya and her crew survive this three-year journey, but more importantly, survive each other? Come with us on their perilous trip to discover just what lies at the end of the universe and the most stunning secret that lies beyond!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryan Whelan
• Release date: Jul 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223635383

Bryan Whelan

The fourth in the Lincoln Cain Spy series from the pen of Bryan Whelan, following on from Edge of Reality, The Hexagonal Dome and The Bandaid Conspiracy. Bryan is a retired Maths, Science and Information Technology teacher from Australia, who has been a fan of science fiction all his life. Author of several science fiction adventure stories, including The Swirling Lights of Paradise, The Hives of God’s World and Truth of Time, he injects a distinctly Australian flavour to them.

Book preview

Prologue

Humans had made it to the year 2148. It was a long hard struggle, and many thought we would wipe ourselves out before this time. But humans always find a way. Most of this success was due to the rise of two global companies. The Western hemisphere had West Corp. Through buyouts and crushing their competitors this company expanded to become the dominant force in the Western world.

In its rise to power, it managed to infiltrate and corrupt every level of government, the military, the economy, and the law. It owns everyone and everything in the West. Countries no longer matter. They are all now part of West Corp.

In the East, a similar story unfolded. Countries such as China, India, Russia, the Middle Eastern Bloc and the rest of Asia had come under the management of the Eastern Consortium. The meteoric rise of this company came about largely in competition with the rise of West Corp. Its ruthless takeover of these countries saw it become the other power in the world.

No longer did politics, nations, or ethnicity dominate the world, everything now was either the Eastern Consortium or West Corp. This had the surprising repercussion of creating stability in the world the likes of which no one had ever experienced. Wars, conflicts, and diplomatic relations gave way to corporate takeovers and the quest for profit.

True, there was still warfare of a sort and espionage had reached new levels of effectiveness. Whoever managed to gain the ascendancy would dominate the world. It became a constant battle between the two conglomerates to see who was the better. They each had grown so large that they both realised early on, neither would ever buy out the other. It simply became a contest to see who had the higher profit margin, operating capital, production output, or whatever.

Hence anything that one conglomerate could do to sabotage the other, they did. Both conglomerates had smaller subsidiary companies under their umbrella and if one conglomerate could send one of the opposition companies broke by whatever means, they jumped at it. While no one ever admitted to deliberately destroying another business, it become common knowledge amongst executives on both sides. However, none of these small victories made any major impact to either conglomerate. They were just too large to bring down.

By 2148, it was clear that these two conglomerates were running the world. All major decisions went through their respective boards and as such those board members became extremely powerful. Not that anyone complained. The overall global economy was probably the most stable it had ever been in Earth’s history.

The citizens of Earth were born into one conglomerate or the other depending on where they lived. They went to conglomerate-controlled schools and then entered a profession selected by that conglomerate. You became indebted to that conglomerate for life.

And here is the weird part. It did not matter what your ethnicity was. You worked for one conglomerate or the other. By this time, ethnic groups from the old countries had settled all over the world. So, for instance, people of Asian backgrounds worked for West Corp simply because they grew up in Canada, say. But once you began working for one conglomerate that was it. You could transfer to different subsidiary companies but swapping from West Corp to the Eastern Consortium or vice versa was unheard of, although both conglomerates always managed to insert spies in each other companies.

Your conglomerate demanded loyalty and in return, they looked after you. They provided housing, employment, schools, entertainment, everything. If you stepped out of line, employment termination was the choice of punishment. Those poor souls existed in communes and relied on company handouts. Those terminated rarely managed to become re-employed.

Technology has blossomed under these two conglomerates. Several years ago, scientists from the Eastern Consortium developed the World’s first spaceship with warping technology. Up until this time, spaceships only had Fusion Drives which gave them the capability of reaching the Moon, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. The race to establish colonies in the solar system progressed rapidly. Several colonies sprang up, but each one was either a West Corp or Eastern Consortium colony. Now with this new warping technology the whole dynamic of space travel suddenly changed.

The lucky scientist who invented it had the unenviable task of explaining how it worked to the general public. He outlined the principle using a sheet of paper. Placing the sheet flat on a table, he explained that this paper represented normal space. He then placed a toy spaceship in the centre of the sheet to represent a spaceship flying through that space. He explained that warping technology allowed the ship to compress the space around it. He showed this by scrunching up the paper around the toy ship. As he did so, most of the paper crushed into a ball with the toy ship now at the paper’s edge. He went on to explain that the warped space moved over the spaceship rather than the ship moving through space.

He went into more technical details that very few understood, but the bottom line was simply that he had invented a spaceship that could travel at ten times the speed of light. Suddenly nearby stars with habitable exoplanets became the new frontier.

West Corp did not take long to ‘acquire’ the technology and built their own warping spaceships. They had spies everywhere in the Eastern Consortium (the Eastern Consortium also had spies in West Corp), and once again, the race was on to establish colonies on various exoplanets in the galaxy.

By 2148, West Corp boasted colonies on planets circling Proxima Centauri while the Eastern Consortium had a similar number of colonies established on planets orbiting Barnard’s Star. These new spaceships took up to eight months to reach these stars. But with unlimited financial backing, colonies quickly established themselves. Soon after, West Corp established a colony at Barnard’s Star and the Eastern Consortium established a colony at Prima Centauri in response.

One initial problem the colonists experienced early on was time, or the measuring of time to be precise. With spaceships now travelling at several times the speed of light, passengers arriving at places like Proxima Centauri or Barnard’s Star would find time had shifted backwards by several years such was the nature of the time dilation effect of travelling faster than the speed of light.

So, both conglomerates agreed (probably for the first time in decades they agreed on anything) to adopt two basic time measures. The first was simply local time which one would use on whatever planet or moon they happened to live on. They calculated a year by the time taken for that planet to complete one orbit around its sun and days and hours were linked to its rotation, just like the time scales back on Earth. The other time scale called Universal Time or UT for short, was the old-time scale back on Earth measured from Greenwich, England (or West Corp 27 as West Corp now called the country).

After overcoming the time problem, another more severe problem became apparent. Establishing a colony on an exoplanet was dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming. Both conglomerates became disillusioned at the prospect of continuing to build more colonies on distant planets simply because they had become uneconomic to continue.

While these exoplanets had resources they could plunder, when they factored in the exorbitant costs of transporting resources back to Earth, both conglomerates quickly ditched any further plans to colonise planets around other star systems.

The existing colonies on both Barnard’s Star and Proxima Centauri, then became scientific research stations which prompted both conglomerates to sink funds into astronomical research as their next ‘space race.’ However, they were more interested in gaining bragging rights over the other. It did not matter in which field.

As a result, only scientists tended to travel to the colonies on these exoplanets. For the average person, they travelled to the Moon instead. It was a typical holiday for one’s annual leave. Both conglomerates had set up luxurious places for their employees to stay. They also created theme parks and adventure trails to keep people entertained.

Colonies on Mars, Callisto, and Ganymede began to suffer in the same way as the colonies on the exoplanets. While they had mineral wealth to exploit, the transport costs back to Earth eventually became prohibitive. These colonies also resigned themselves to being scientific research stations.

Scuffles and conflicts arose in these remote locations as often as they did on Earth. But the lack of an atmosphere on some and the simple remoteness of others made these conflicts somewhat more extreme than for people on Earth. The conglomerates were loath to step in when this happened. This threatened the future of these colonies, but the conglomerates had little concern for their local troubles. Yet people still migrated there from time to time.

With both conglomerates now heavily involved with astronomical research, there arose yet another race. Who could develop an even better form of propulsion? This came out of a desire for each conglomerate to send humans further and further out into the universe. As if moving at ten times the speed of light was not enough, scientists tried to invent ways of breaking that speed limit.

The space agency arm of West Corp called the West Aeronautical Space Administration or WASA had begun a program of investigating alternative means of propulsion, while the space agency arm of the Eastern Consortium, the Eastern Space Authority or ESA, sunk its resources into developing better warping engines. Their thinking was simply that this would allow them to build more voluminous spaceships so they would have the upper hand should they locate any valuable resources, or if any more conflicts arose in space.

Despite the underhanded tactics by both conglomerates and the occasional open conflict, life was quite settled in 2148. Each person had a guaranteed career, the economy was strong, and living standards had never been higher. But 2148 would prove to be the year that began a journey of discovery. A discovery that would forever change Earth’s place in the universe.

Chapter 1

Maya Edwards lay on her bed unable to sleep. Staring out the window into the night sky, she saw the constellation Orion in all its majesty. With its distinctive saucepan shape and the spectacular nebula near its top, it was still an insignificant speck in the realm of the universe. It reminded her of just how insignificant she would be now that she was all alone.

It had been three weeks since her husband’s funeral. While she managed to put on a brave face for the people there, inside she felt alone. The accident could have happened to any shuttle pilot, but why him? Her marriage was not a life-fulfilling dream, but she knew she had him to be with should she ever need companionship. But now there is no one.

It became apparent after the wake that her friends were more friends of her husband than her. Her only family was her estranged daughter, who appeared at the funeral but left soon after without ever saying a word to her. Her husband’s family never had much to do with her either.

Now in her mid-fifties, Maya could see no future for herself other than continuing with her current life, such as it was. She was also a shuttle pilot, ferrying passengers between the Earth and the Moon. When she first started, she could not contain her wonder and awe at the sight of seeing the universe from her viewport. The myriad of stars, nebulae, and galaxies always presented an unbelievable sight for new pilots. But as she flew the shuttle each day, the sight became less and less spectacular and she found herself becoming more engrossed in making her flight finish as quickly as possible. She felt like an old-fashioned bus driver taking tourists to a holiday destination.

When she learned of her husband’s shuttle burning up nearing the moon after a mysterious fire ignited in the ship, she felt shock, but not devastation. It led to a complete re-organisation of how maintenance crews tested the heat shields before each flight. For Maya, it felt like something mundane but constant in her life had suddenly vanished.

Her boss told her to take as much time off as she needed to grieve. But Maya could not grieve the loss of someone whom she really liked but did not love. Instead, she found herself questioning her life choices up until now and pondering just what she might do next. While she enjoyed the thrill of space travel, but presently she could not face continuing in her current role. Memories of her husband’s death would linger in her mind every time she flew that shuttle.

So, here she was on her bed once again, in the middle of the night, staring out at the grandeur of the night sky. It was strange, her thoughts focussing on changing her life rather than missing her husband. Why is that?

She had always been a quiet person, preferring to spend her time reading books or watching movies rather than going out. This probably explains why her so-called friends were really her husband’s. He was the social one of the two, the party person. She came to loathe her husband dragging her out to functions just because she was his wife. She didn’t mind being alone, which confused her somewhat. Perhaps it is a natural trait that she was born with.

Even so, it was her fondness for isolation that prompted her husband to convince her to join the space pilot program with him. He was the one who encouraged her to pursue this career, even when she doubted herself. But once she became a qualified pilot, she found the isolation of the journey comforting. Pilots had a separate cockpit just for them when they flew the shuttles. While she enjoyed not having to socialise with anyone, she always knew that she had her husband to come home to whenever she finished. Not anymore.

Staring out into space was her way of coping with his sudden absence. Even though she never considered him the centre of her universe, he was always a welcome sight whenever she returned home. She felt like someone had ripped part of her away, leaving a hole in her life. She needs to fill that hole with something, but what?

She went through the motions of daily life. She had wasted no time in removing all traces of him save for one photo of him she kept in the lounge. She did not want to test herself if she could bear to look at his things. She avoided the phone calls and messages from his family and friends, who tried to offer their condolences and support. She knew that any conversation with those people would conjure up memories of him. Strange, she thought, as when he was alive, she took him for granted. His usefulness was merely as someone who was there just in case she needed another person. With him gone, suddenly she needed him and any reminders of him made her long for him.

For the last three weeks, she had locked herself in her apartment, shutting out everyone and everything. She curled up on her bed, each night wondering just what she might have done to prevent his accident. Of course, the accident had nothing to do with her. She could only count herself lucky that it did not occur on her shuttle. She replayed the memory of the accident in her mind, wondering what her husband would have felt in the last moments of his life. Did he think of her?

The next morning, she rose and shuffled into the bathroom stopping to stare at herself in the mirror. She looked disapprovingly at her auburn hair, straggly and dishevelled from another sleepless night. Her eyes with folds of puffy skin below them made her look like she had just come second in a boxing match.

Her skin remained soft and subtle, belying her age of 54, as well as her trim body. Her employment required that she kept physically fit. But staring at the mirror, Maya wanted to return to the person she once was. She realised that if she was ever going to get on with her life, she needed to change it. And the first step would be to change the way she looked.

She started by brushing her hair and tying it in a ponytail at the back. She even smiled at the result. She hadn’t worn a ponytail since she was twenty. It even made her look twenty or so she thought. Now for the rest of her face.

Like most women these days, she had a multi-function makeup kit. This marvel of modern technology allowed her to select any shade of lipstick, blusher, highlighter, and concealer she chose. It even had an online A.I. makeup artist to advise her.

With new lipstick, blusher, and highlighter, Maya felt and looked like a new person. She could present herself to the world as a new woman. After breakfast, she plucked up enough courage to step outside and take the walkway to the local mall. For the last three weeks, she had ordered everything online. This was a major step for her. Mingling with other people made her nervous at first, but she kept reminding herself that this was a necessary step if she wanted to reinvent herself. She held her nerve and managed to complete her grocery shopping without incident.

She felt like an ordeal had finished when she re-entered her apartment but congratulated herself for making it there and back without having a mental breakdown. Opening a bottle of wine in celebration, she ventured her first look at the daily news, weather, and other articles.

Sipping the wine slowly, she perused the current events. Nothing new had happened in the three weeks she shut herself off. The same corporate strife, crimes, stunts, and even technological achievements made Maya smile that she had missed nothing of any interest in her three-week isolation. Perhaps the world needs to change as well as her.

However, one article did grab her attention. She normally had an aversion to reading articles involving space travel. Her job as a pilot was boring enough without having to read about it.

But this article talked about a new form of propulsion, one that promises to revolutionise space travel forever. While there were no technical details about the propulsion system, the last paragraph mentioned that there would be a recruitment program to find space pilots to test this new system. Maybe this is the next step in the reinvention of Maya!

Chapter 2

Two weeks later, Maya found herself sitting in a room with about fifty other people filling out forms. She already regretted accepting the invitation to try out for this new pilot job. Looking around at the number of other candidates, she felt sure