Destiny Among The Stars - Chapter 4
January 24, 1991, Helios Aerospace's Constellation Project Lab, TX.
The past few months had been hard for me—hard but fulfilling. Every day I would either drive to work or, more commonly, wake up in the room I had taken as my own two doors down from my lab. Then, I would start working on the prototypes.
The lab was a marvel of modern design, dominated by sleek white tones and metal tables. The room was expansive, filled with state-of-the-art equipment and the quiet sound of keyboards being pressed and data servers whirling hot air, each station was meticulously organized. A thin glass panel with a door separated my desk from the wider lab area, providing a semblance of privacy without isolating me from the team.
After a few hours of working on the algorithm for encrypting and decrypting the laser, the engineers would stream in. I made it a point of pride to know everyone I was working with, but I would be a liar if I didn't have favourites within my team. Because that was who they were—my father had pulled many strings, and I was informed that should our work be accomplished, it would be spun into its own subsidiary company that I would oversee.
So, no pressure.
Today was as usual, except for the fact that my favourite engineer decided to show me the satellite he had been working on. The blueprints were spread in front of me, and his almost barren head leaned forward so he could stare at me with black eyes full of enthusiasm.
"I have done it!" Bill proclaimed proudly and loudly.
Loud enough that a few engineers working on the thruster prototype sent him stink eyes.
"Bill…" I sighed.
He sheepishly chuckled, cradling the back of his head with one hand as he sent everyone an apologetic look. "Sorry, guys! Just excited to show the bossman something!"
I ignored the happenings around me and stared at the satellite blueprint in front of me. It was brilliant in its simplicity. I had just recently gotten my Doctorate, but my interest in engineering had been fostered since young by my father and I knew enough from my past life working at a few IT companies to make it work.
What I was shown wasn't that different from the usual communication satellites—two large solar panels were connected to the main body where the computer and the small reactor resided. Still, it was considered an innovation here, satellites were obviously not that commonly used and easy to send upward considering the political climate nowadays.
A small number of thrusters were set up all around the satellite, the programming of the computer would make it so the satellite would automatically keep its position unless specified otherwise, but the main use of the computer was what would be below everything. An omnidirectional mix of mirrors and laser pointers. Every satellite would have its own 'local' computer handling certain regions, but when they were overloaded with use, it would go beyond to the other satellites and pick those with lesser use and free usage to spread their own workload until the pressure was gone.
The satellites also had their own radio communication with antennas to receive and send radio communication to each other to keep abreast of their position and needs.
"You resolved the overheating problem of the reactor and computer," I stated simply as I looked over the design once again. "But is the energy requirement still fulfilled? I see that you have reduced the size of the reactor."
"That's the brilliance of this solution! See, that sort of solution was already around, but I learned about it from my wife, funny enough. She heard the news about that space hotel stuff the TV keeps on talking about—"
"Bill," I sighed. I liked the man, but God, did he tend to go on tangents. "The solution?"
"Infra-red radiation. We use those alongside a mix of closed-loop solvents that will transfer the extra heat from the reactor to space to be expelled every few hours. The satellite will use those few moments of thrust to turn around, orienting another side toward the sun."
"Thermal louvres and shades," I mused. "This would work. Does the battery's shelf life still remain at what we estimated?"
"Unfortunately, no," Bill responded, checking his own notes. "We will see about five years removed from the thirty we had previously estimated."
"This will bring costs up," a voice piped up, and I looked up in surprise as Sam leaned on the door leading to my open office.
"Sam?"
"'Lo!" she said cheerily, waving a lunchbox with her hand. "I am here for the regular reminder that you need food to survive!"
I laughed, standing up and gently kissing her on the lips, smiling as our foreheads gently touched before I reluctantly let her go.
"Don't worry about cost," I whispered. "I have a solution for that."
Turning around to look back at Bill, who seemed entirely too awkward for our public display of affection for a married man, I informed him, "Go and see if Marc and Leonard have finished drawing up designs for the maintenance platform for the Iris system."
"Sure thing, boss." As he left, he turned around rather shamefully, stammering a greeting. "It was nice to see you, Miss Carter!"
"You too, Mr. Lee."
"He means well," I said to Sam, my smile twitching in second-hand embarrassment as Bill awkwardly made empty bottles fall to the ground in his wake. "How this man got a wife and a kid, I will never know."
"So, Iris?" she asked after laughing alongside me for a few moments. It felt wonderful to have her here. "I thought the project had no name besides its codename."
"Constellations felt weird," I admitted. "It's more like a descriptive term for the satellite concept we are going for. Considering the company is named after a Greek God, it felt right to name it after Iris. Besides, she is so overlooked I felt like she might enjoy the attention."
"Careful," Sam said, bumping me with her hips. "I would feel jealous if I didn't know better that she didn't exist."
"You would be surprised," I muttered under my breath before continuing more loudly, "So, what have you brought this time?"
We ate together what I mentally dubbed the best food ever—burgers and some fries from a diner five streets down from Helios Aerospace HQ. It had become a recurrent item in my diet since I had started working full time on making my vision possible. The satellites would be easy to send up; the infrastructure for it was already in place.
You could say a lot of things about Dev Ayesa, especially about how he led the company (read: not lead), but the man was determined. He had a vision and had prepared for it long before an opportunity to shorten his illusory goal presented itself. This meant that we already had ways to send stuff up into space. Helios Aerospace had also already procured itself the tools to mine Helium-3 from the Moon, so spacecraft were already designed and ready to be sent up anytime.
This meant that the only pressure on us from the Iris Lab was to design the best Satellite Constellation we could. Many redundancies were built into it. Lab tests were promising, and what we got from one live test with a prototype satellite had been very good in showing us the many ways it could be improved.
Now the only thing to do was to find a way to drive up demand for the system. Iris was theoretically capable of linking every part of the Earth together in an instant and a very fluid way, but not many were interested in its potential since the intranet was opened enough that d-mails were the only thing they could conceive from the system, and that was already a thing.
This is why I had been regularly talking with my father about the possibility of getting our own computer company and employing more programmers if only to kickstart something like multiplayer video games and internet websites.
Though I could do without Twitter.
Huh, that gave me an idea.
"Bill?" I asked out loud. It was already dark, and most people were gone, though not Bill—another point toward him getting a raise when this was all over.
"Yes, boss?" he said wearily. I wouldn't hold it against him; he was surrounded by blueprints like an olden-days scholar in a medieval library.
I tapped down on my desk, drumming my fingers against its cold metallic surface. "We got more space on the satellite from your change to the battery and cooling system, right?"
"Yes, around ten centimetres squared."
That was a thing; we did not use the imperial system—the irony. We fought the Soviets but never defended ourselves against the most hidden of enemies—the French. I must have been more tired than I thought if this was where my mind wandered.
"Would that be enough to add a small server in the satellite? Something to better handle the load our ground system might be under."
"Might be," he thought about it for a moment. "It would require the cooling system to be extended, and for that to be possible, we would have to revise the size of every component…"
"Meaning we would have to possibly only send one satellite up there per launch instead of the two we designed them for," I finished. "Alright, we should probably just increase the size of the computer so its computing power handles requests faster proportionally to what it would demand of the cooling system."
I stretched, hearing satisfying pops from my back before yawning.
"Alright, Bill. I think I am going to leave it at that today. See you tomorrow."
Rising, I went toward my coat, and Bill raised an eyebrow in surprise. "You leaving today?"
"Yes," I sighed. "My girlfriend has requested that I return to our shared bed instead of leaving it empty."
"So it's official then," Bill said with a laugh, clapping his hands gleefully. "You guys are together together. Like fiancée or something?"
"Something like that," I rolled my eyes. "Just need to break the news to her dad and get his approval, but I am terrified of the man."
"Can't be that bad. My own father-in-law refuses to talk to me even in the presence of his grandkids, and the man lives in my own house. How bad could it be?"
That raised a lot of questions, but I was too tired to ask them. "Brigadier General Carter has taken to polish his collection of knives in my presence every time I come to take his daughter, talking intimately about how they are sharp enough to remove tendons of meat in one stroke."
"...good luck," Bill said to me after a moment.
"Won't need it," I said vindictively. "Sam lost a bet two weeks ago. She said no way anything interesting would happen at the RNC. I disagreed. I won."
"Ah, the NASA candidate. Wilson seems a nice enough candidate."
"No politics at work, but I agree. Anyway, see you tomorrow."
"See you!"
As I left the building and approached my car, I was ambushed by a most dastardly enemy. A brown-haired woman with an audio recorder in her hand stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
"Mister Hilliard, is it true you are working on a spy satellite for the United States' secret services?" she demanded, her eyes sharp and unrelenting.
A reporter. I sighed, this was becoming a bad running gag. "No," I replied curtly. "What I am working on is no secret. I have written a thesis on it which is publicly available should you request it from my university. The fruit of my work at Helios Aerospace should hopefully be not only rewarding for the citizens of our fair country, but also for the world."
She didn't miss a beat. "But isn't it true that such technology could be used for surveillance purposes? How can the public be sure it won't be misused?"
I shook my head, irritation bubbling under the surface. "Miss, it is late, and I would very much like to be with my fiancée. Everything that I am permitted to talk about the project publicly has already been said. For more information, you will have to reach our CEO."
She let out a frustrated sigh but didn't back down. Instead, she thrust a card into my hand. "This is my card. I am Lois Lane, working for Global Watch News. Call me when you are allowed to do so."
Her audacity was grating. I was half a mind to throw the card away in front of her, but it would be unseemly. Instead, I pocketed it without a word.
"Surely you can give me a hint about the next phase of your project? The public has a right to know," she pressed, stepping closer and invading my personal space.
I took a deep breath, struggling to keep my composure. "Miss Lane, as I said, any further inquiries need to be directed to our CEO. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow."
Ignoring her further attempts to pry information from me, I sidestepped her and reached my car. Her persistence was impressive, but there was a limit to how much impoliteness I could tolerate. As I drove away, I couldn't help but shake my head at the lengths some reporters would go to for a story.
If my plan of finding the gate and mounting my own program was to come to fruition I would surely need to protect myself from them. That or take control of the planet and instal a despotic government controlling all press in the country. Perhaps both. Exhaustion was slowly but surely starting to make my thoughts wander into dangerous territories.
Perhaps that was how the Goa'uld felt, because they sure as hell didn't sleep. Evil never did. Do Asgard sleep? I stopped in front of a red light, letting out a longer sigh.
"I really need to sleep."
Author's note: I have loved the reviews of y'all, glad to see that what I wrote tailored around my own wants is pleasurable for other people. This chapter was a bit harder for me to write, mostly because I felt like it was just a big exposition chapter without much substance, but I felt it was important to at least show that Adam and his teams had been working on the project for a year and that it wasn't totally coming from nowhere as the infrastructure and design teams were already in employ under Helios before he came.
Borg Colective: Yeah, honestly I started binge-watching For All of Mankind two weeks ago, and then re-watched Stargate's episode where they go back in the past and thought to myself 'Sure would work well together'.
Hadrian Caesar and rafale05: Thanks, glad you liked it!
frankieu: That's his plan for the start, try and get the gate under control and possibly start off-world mission out of his own book, but he is intimately aware that it is impossible to keep it a secret forever and that the fallout would be horrible so he will take a step to make it more palatable.
Guest: I only had the one chapter when I posted the story, I had only written the outline, an ongoing project that I kept on expanding every time I slept and dreamt of it but don't worry I am invested in it and for now have written at least 2k words every day.
I am glad that I was the one introducing you to For All of Mankind, hopefully, you will enjoy it!
Azai Jin: The romance between Adam and Sam was one that I at first didn't plan to add at all, this was one of those brain farts that happened while I was editing the first chapter and thought worked well enough to introduce the crossover, it has since taken a life of its own, glad you enjoyed it!
And yeah, a result of the crossover is that Sam's mother never died, meaning there was never a rift between her father and brother meaning he entered the Air Force after his dad.
I have plans for Seth, as for the others sealed in canopy jars, for now, they are impossible to reach though it will probably change as Adam gets his own resources.
JustAnotherFan217: I totally agree, I kept on searching for SG1 inserts and the few I found, I frankly either didn't like or were cut short so I decided to make one myself, with the added pleasure of making the first For All of Mankind crossover.
As for the community thing, don't worry about it, I wasn't taking it seriously, honestly, it made me laugh a lot, I took it in good humour.