Entry 1

This is the first entry from the journal. I won’t add any more from my side.

5th May 2355,

It was just another cold morning, I don’t know why do I even bother to mention the weather. I haven’t seen a moderately warm day in the past 300 years. I always preferred cold weather but only for two or three months at a stretch. It used to become a drag at the end of the third month.

Now, there’s no waiting for spring or summer or even autumn. It’s always winter, the same depressing sunless winter. Why am I even going on about it? This winter was invited to stay and it is not going away anytime soon. Today was too important to be wasted on this godforsaken weather.

The Dyson Rings were to be launched today, our one hope for a perennial energy source. I had to start with my routine much earlier today. Husky was not happy since we were gonna miss the usual morning run and he knows he is not going to see me the whole day. Husky, my canine kindred spirit had a temper and he was not shy of showing it. I tried to make him understand the importance of the launch. He whined for a while and then sat down with his breakfast.

I had to leave earlier for the Center than other days. I wanted to take Husky to the office to witness the event but most people there won’t prefer the presence of a gray wolf. Husky is a very loving companion even though he is a little longer than me but only I can appreciate that fact.

At the Center, everyone except me was visibly excited. They had their reasons to be excited as the Dyson’s Rings were gonna solve a lot of our impending issues. The proper placement of the rings would remove any kind of problem with energy deficit. As for me, I haven’t found many reasons to feel anything, even fear or excitement in a long time. I prefer to not get excited, excitement always brings a large scope of error in judgement.

The engineer and their assistbots were busy checking the launch vehicles and the payload. It was imperative that there were minimum errors during the whole process.

We had ten carrier space shuttles that needed to be launched within a period of ten minutes or else the rings wouldn’t be set in tandem with each other. Speed was an important factor and fortunately, we had Gregor.

Gregor had developed an engine that can harness and store energy from the thunderstorms continuously raging in the stratosphere, it reduced our dependency on solid fuel by a huge margin. The batteries in the engine also delivered high power at constant capacity to maintain the momentum. The atmosphere is much denser than the time when UAE had its first moon landing.

I can’t help but wonder about the state of our program if quantum batteries had not been invented. We would not have been able to even test our calculations. Whatever, we did do it, against all odds and are now on the way to harness energy from the Sun which we cannot see anymore from the Earth. I have longed to see the sun from the day we moved inside the Vault. I don’t know how many centuries more I have to wait to see our life giver.

After equalization of pressure with the outside atmosphere, the carriers were launched precisely at 10:00 AM IST and all of them were in their designated trajectories by 10:20 AM. The easy part was over, now we had to wait till they reached Mercury.

To be continued…

Note: Dyson rings, quantum batteries have been defined under the category Definition