The lecture
The noise of many people talking waves trough the auditorium.
Everyone is talking in excitement, asking himself what discovery could be the reason for them being there.
Suddenly, the lights dim and a long, grey skinned man walks to the podium, his four arms waving next to his body.
The man takes place on the podium and clears his throat; everyone becomes quiet and is looking full of expectations at the unannounced speaker.
“My name is Dr. Korpøl”, he says, while skimming the audience with his one eye.
“I’m here to tell you something more about our latest discovery.”
“Before the time off all current know races, there was a precursor race, as you all know, their technology was superior to that of our own, today we are still finding their artifacts and they continue to overshadow our current technology.”
He takes a pause watches the public and nods.
“Five months ago, My colleagues and I found indications of one of the most powerful relics they created, on the
twenty-first oscillation of the calendar, we’ve discovered that our whole galaxy is influenced by a field similar to that of the created by our propulsion mechanism of choice, the
H-drive, it is in fact so similar that I would say that it is one and the same but at the moment we don’t have enough data to confirm this.”
A man raises his hand, and asks: “What does it matter, I mean those fields are already everywhere because of most people flying their ships with a H-drive, so why should this discovery be of any importance?”
Dr. Korpøl stares at the man and says: “If you would first listen to what I have to say before starting to ask such questions it would probably help you understand a lot. Next time you interrupt me for something like that I will ask you to leave this room.”
The man’s face turns green and he looks shy at his bottom tentacles while mumbling “Sorry, it won’t happen again.”
“Does anyone else have a question?” asks Dr. Korpøl.
When no one responds, Korpøl continues his story.
“The fact that we discovered a field that seems to have similar properties to the H-field means that we can finally have an explanation for why our Galaxy seems to act different compared to others, but more over this later.”
“The first thing I was asking myself when we discovered the field was where it could originate from, after some research in some old DNA-drives I found an old text based on an precursor artifact.
The text I found spoke about giant star ships, we have however never found any starships made by the precursors, this made me think that it could maybe be a translation error and pushed me to search for the original text, when I found it I was stunned, the text didn’t spoke over giant start ships, it spoke over giant ships made of stars!”
At this moment, a surprised murmur goes through the audience.
“Silence please!” shouts someone, to everyone’s surprise, it is the man who earlier interrupted Dr. Korpøl but nevertheless everyone gets silent.
Dr. Korpøl clears his throat and continues.
“It is my belief that this text should be interpreted literally and that the precursors where indeed able to move whole star systems.
I believe that they developed a propulsion system that uses H-fields in its mechanism and that it so powerful that it is able to move whole star systems and maybe even whole galaxy’s and this is where it gets interesting. This would mean that we finally have a reason to explain why our planets don’t move, why our galaxy seems to be static and why it looks like our galaxy has ‘drag’, as we all know.
The H-field
induces a force that counteracts all change of position in it , the fact that there is a H-field everywhere in our galaxy means that it would induce a force that would eventually make planets stop by creating a force pointed in the opposite direction of the planetary movement, effectively making them stand still after thousands of years, this also explains why our reaction engine ships stop when we turn off their thrusters, the field creates a force that makes them stop.
By studying geological samples we’ve also discovered that the field varied in strength over time, much like a failing light bulb starts to flicker when it is near the end of its life time, and this is the scary part, I believe that there is such a propulsion system in the center of our galaxy that never turned off when the precursors suddenly disappeared, and it is my belief that this device is now starting to fail, like the light bulb it starts to flicker, we are lucky to be in moment in time where the field is strong, so that the position-change counteracting force is strong enough to counteract gravity, but when the field should weaken or even disappear, my teams calculations suggest that it our whole galaxy would start to ‘implode’, planets would be pulled into their stars, and everything would collapse.
My team and I will conduct further research into this to try to pinpoint the exact location of the device.”
At this moment Dr. Korpøl realizes that his communicator is ringing in his pocket, he quickly skims its screen and with a surprised look on his face he says: “I’m sorry people but it looks like I’m have duties elsewhere at the moment.”
Korpøl walks of the podium to the door of the auditorium while the audience is firing questions at him; he opens the door and goes outside to do whatever is expected from him.
direct link (created by Shuul)
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Slowing down
The following is an extract of the diary of Dr. H. Korpøl, researcher at the Institute for Precursor Science (IPS):
Day 7, month 5:
What an exciting month it has been!
The first 3 localization beacons are in place and the current signal indicates that the source of the H-field is somewhere in the direction of 'the center', but let's not jump to conclusions yet. I'll have to wait until the other 7 beacons are installed to get more significant data.
I'm so excited about this!
On a side note:
there was yet another accident yesterday, luckily the guy hasn't any mayor wounds and he will be able to start working again soon.
It's a pity that we seem to have such a bad luck with our workers, the accident counter now stands on 6 accidents and we're only working for 2 months!
We can't afford to lose any more workers, we're already behind on schedule and any more slowing down could mean that we lose our investors.
Day 10, month 5:
Yet another accident, a lethal one this time!
What the hell is happening here?
I'm starting to suspect that somebody is trying to sabotage us, but why, why would anyone want to sabotage scientific progress?
Tomorrow, I'm going to go to SpŒndor to search for a private investigator, maybe he can tell me what's happening here.
Day 11, month 5:
Today, I went to SpŒndor; It's an ugly city but I found what I was looking for.
I hired an investigator named ånjå, he seems to know what he's doing and he asked for a fair price, to be fair I would've been prepared to pay him more but he refused telling me that I could always pay him more after he fixed the job. I really hope he will be able to make this madness stop, certainly whit the presentation of our discovery coming closer, we wouldn't want any bad publicity.
Day 29, month 5:
Finally! ånjå seems to be doing a good job in keeping everything save, we have had exactly zero accidents in the past weeks, although he hasn't discovered who was sabotaging us yet.
We've also started construction on beacon #4 and the best news is that we're not anymore behind on schedule, if everything keeps going as smooth as it is now we will even finish a month earlier than expected!
I'll think I'll give the workers a day off tomorrow to celebrate this!