[ Sphere ]

Preliminary Work for Fields

Preface and Purpose

I intend Fields to be a short story, set in the Science-Fiction genre, which covers the topic of an accidental discovery of a species that exists beyond out traditional three-dimensional space. The topic of how man is to communicate with alien species has always been based on the supposition that we and they will share a mutual time/space frame. I propose that without a mutual means of communication, a conversation with this, our first non-human contact, will be frustrated, and ultimately result in nothing of importance: everything useful the aliens have to offer cannot be explained to our three-dimensional way of thought any more than we can explain our motion to a two-dimensional cartoon character. This brings up the idea that learning must come from understanding, and to understand another, they must be our equals. One must question whether anyting truly "new" can be learned from a peer, or if new ideas are merely facets of the potential inside all of us.

Plot and Synopsis

We begin the story descending from Liverey, a space station supporting the the construction and outfitting of the Far Shores, the first faster-than-light probe to be sent to Alpha Centuri. Garrett Kinsley observes dawn breaking over the South Atlantic as his shuttle descends towards the Brazil Tau-Field Projection Headquaters, known simply as the Field. the Field is the third man-made object to be visible from space, the second being the Field's sister-project constructed two years earlier over the magnetic south pole. The Spire was 1.8 kilometers tall, constructed from twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and five black iron-nickel struts. It's whole purpose was to provide power for the Field, by way of harnessing the polar magnetic field, and focusing it through an immense converter, which slowly charged the power cells near the Field. In the year-and-a-half since it's completion, the Spire had produced enough energy to power the NorthAm industrial machine for six years. The Spire was the brain-child of Kinsley, and in itself an achievement of a lifetime. The Field, however , dwarfed the Spire in comparison. The Field, from space, was a dull grey square, five-hundred kilometeres in each dimension, and represented mankinds greatest engineering feat. The Field was laced with a power conduit system that would carry the accumulated energy of a year-and-a-half instantly to five-hundered Kinsley Tau-Field Projectors. The projectors, in turn, would cast a Tau-Field which, when overlapped by the other projectors' fields, would build a resonance that would propagate through the Earth's mantle, to be reflected by the nickel-iron core, and amplified back through the magma to be re-collected by the Field's power-web. This resonance would continue for 1.8 milliseconds, at which time the accumulated energy would be turned outwards and upwards, towards the waiting Far Shores. The Far Shores was outfitted with a gossamar net, three kilometers across, that would catch the thrown Tau-Field, and be focus the field beyond the classical Resching-Bounding Potentials, resulting in the probe's physical state to be removed from three-dimensional space , and to appear X light-years away in Alpha Centari's locale.


The Magister mgd@sunsite.unc.edu