Optical
The Fall of the Eleventh
Analogue Dictionary said:parable (n) [ENG]
1. A fictional narrative used as an example of morality or spirituality; a story which teaches a lesson - 'the Parable of the Good Samaritan'. (Antiquated)
2. The name of the ill-fated ship which colonised Analogue Earth in 2406 AD (0 Analogue), and then disappeared on its return flight to Earth.
3. From (2), a strong curse; 'may you suffer the luck of the Parable'
- from the Analogue Dictionary of English, Italian and Russian
___________________________________A History of the People of Analogue Earth (Giacomo Cappechi said:It had started so well. In the era of interstellar colonisation, war would be a thing of the past, humanity would have as much living space as it could possibly need, the world would unite in pursuit of a common goal...
A Chinese astronaut, Zhang Li, was the first to set foot on Mars in 2028; minor and then large-scale scientific bases were set up. That was the beginning of it, really. By the end of the year 2056, there was talk of a United Nations-funded venture to terraform and colonise Mars. The Earth needed the relief, straining under the weight of ten and a half billion people. Of course, the States had its Moon colonies running by that point, but hydroponics and an area of dusty, dry land in the Sea of Tranquillity the size of East London could only sustain so many people.
Twenty-three hundred saw the halfway point of the New Earth Project, but even then everybody claimed to know the endeavour was falling apart. The major partners were arguing, threatening to break away from the combined effort. Russia had never been friendly with its fellow powers - president Feodor Alexandrov's New Communism had set it apart somewhat, despite making Russia a roaring economic success. Britain wasn't happy with the amount of say it was getting; many of the scientists were British or working in British universities and the British government felt that they weren't being given the proper representation. China wanted rewards for its explorational efforts. The American team was having financial trouble due to trying to split funds between the New Earth Project and its moon colony.
It was Germany, though, who pulled out in 2303. Almost two hundred years of supplying heavy industry to the effort had weakened its economy severely. It had other projects, its government stated - though nobody outside of Germany really knew what those projects were. After that, the whole thing fell apart. Nobody really had the funds to continue but the major players, Russia, China, Britain and the USA. Disagreements between them had done enough work to pull that apart as well.
It took fifty years for the scientists and budding explorers of the world to pull another effort together. By that point, relations between the world's major powers had cooled somewhat. China doggedly pursued colonisation of other celestial bodies in the Sol system, founding settlements on Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Triton, Pluto and Charon within thirty years of the end of the New Earth Project. They didn't go near Mars. Nobody did. It was felt that enough damage had been done, and that door was closed.
2355 was a year of low morale in its early days. An economic slump meant that unemployment in every country - except in Russia and Kazakhstan, the New Communist powers - was almost as high as it had been at the height of the Great Depression in America. Dreams of interstellar empires and the glory of humanity were lost in the scramble for bread. And then science announced its greatest discovery - an Earth analogue; about the right size, only slightly warmer and only ten or so light years away.
They'd missed it in their previous searches of the nearby universe - nobody could explain why to the stunned governments of the world. Maybe it had been the scientists' little secret. That was certainly a popular theory in those early days. All that was forgotten, however, when only the next year another scientist, Russian Alexei Kasparov, claimed to have the plans for a ship that could ferry loads of ten thousand people at a time - at a third of lightspeed! - to 'Analogue Earth', along with secure compartments for a few members of a number of animal species. It even had hydroponic gardens which could support the entire trip. It was a behemoth, but it could be built if the resources within the Moon were drawn upon.
That meant America had to be in on the project, and naturally Russia needed to be a partner since Kasparov, whose brainchild the project was, was a national. Britain reluctantly joined at the urging of several universities and colleges. Italy, who, despite losing southern Italy to an independence movement in 2132, had largely replaced Germany as an industrial power in Europe, became the fourth partner. And unbelievably, the thing was built - and worked. Smaller vessels were soon carrying groups from the partner nations to the Moon to be part of the great voyage. Oxford University sent half of its research department along; a group from Eton College successfully lobbied to be part of the endeavour, as did one from the University of Milan. Russia opened its applications process to Kazakhs as well as Russians, and many small independent groups soon joined the voyage, making up the Russian contingent of twenty-five hundred people. Everyone wanted to join the great 'Ark'.
That only left one detail; a name. The "New Ark" was put forward and rejected by Kasparov. Other names followed. It was a New York Times competition for the official American name submission which eventually produced the name. A reader wrote in pointing out how the project had brought together four countries at different points on the ideological scale - like a fable or a Parable. The Parable moniker spread - and stuck. So, in the year 2376, the Parable set out for Analogue Earth on a voyage of discovery. The voyage went smoothly, by all accounts, and ten thousand, two hundred passengers were successfully disembarked in early 2406. Analogue Earth was almost perfect for human inhabitation. Life was present, but less sophisticated and basically harmless; there was a kind of flying insect that bit and left painful red blotches, a little larger than mosquitoes on Earth, but little else really did much harm. The flora was thick and almost impenetrable, though; danger might lurk in the dense thickets of trees that resembled variations on Earth conifers. Satisfied, and the colonies set up, later that year the skeleton crew of the Parable left on its return voyage. It never came back.
Had another voyage to Analogue been made, its new inhabitants would have found out how the Parable passed just slightly too close to the Sun as it journeyed back to Earth, and how, caught in the gravity of the Sun and unable to escape, its crew lost their lives, dying a fiery death. They might have been told how Earth mourned for the thousand men and women who had spent, in most cases, their entire lives on the Parable. They could have been told that the governments of planet Earth had solemnly sworn never to attempt such a project again. The risk was simply too great, the gain too small. They might have been informed of the government projects to control overpopulation...
But they weren't. As far as Analogue Earth and its inhabitants are concerned, the Parable vanished, Earth had forgotten them and they were condemned to an existence alone. Many skills were simply absent from its populace, and much knowledge was lost, the greater part of the books and plans for machinery intended for the second flight of the Parable. Analogue Earth four hundred years later, as a result, resembled something of an industrial-era society - no electronics, no oil, and only rudimentary electricity. Travel was limited to ships on the sea and lighter-than-air vessels in the air. Land travel, after almost a hundred deaths, had been ruled too dangerous. Settlement was limited to the areas where no forest was found; British and American in the north, Italian in the far east and Russian in the south.
A new beginning for humanity...
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