Loose Ends Snippet 1

Loose Ends is a short story anthology book taking place in the Founding of the Federation time period. There are 13 stories, some fun, some as a few people put it, 'scary'.


Here is the first scene from the first story, Bell.


Note: Okay, blogger is being a butthead and won't let me change the font color. So I highlighted it so you can see the text.

2230

 

When Lagroose Industries broke up after the A.I. War, Doctor Alexi Bell found himself without a job briefly. Trevor Hillman and the A.I. Athena led an exodus of personnel to Mars University. He followed when they confirmed he could continue to work on his holy grail, an ansible project.

The idea had been proposed centuries ago, but the ability to perfect the engineering involved had taken time. Every major corporation had been trying their own approach to solving it. Lagroose Industries were one of the few ones that had the R&D capabilities to continue with it. He'd started there as a wet behind the ears noob just before the break up. He'd made several advances though, which was why the program had moved forward.

But, the A.I. war and breakup had interfered with the research. It had taken him years to recreate his work at the university. Along the way, he'd found out one by one the other researchers working on the process had run into one wall or another and had quit. He'd been distressed to learn he had to teach and work on other projects, which had delayed getting the ansible back up and running.

During that time, he'd assembled a small hard core team of supporters. They'd managed to get the essential materials together to move to space.

His team's only competition had been the resurrected MIT until the program had been shut down five years prior. The MIT team had concluded that there was just too much gravitational interference from the planet as well as mass around the lab to create an effective cage.

But they had made a few advances to the field, so when Alexi had heard that the program was shutting down, he'd managed to convince the dean and his physics department head, Professor Crowle, to snap up whomever they could. A lot of the top researchers had moved on or retired, but they had snagged the one real find as far as he was concerned, the fine mind (and body) of Patricia Watson PHD.

Pat had been keen about moving off of the still polluted and contaminated Earth to greener pastures. She hadn't been keen about leaving her family behind though. She also hadn't been keen about Mars though; Mars was still centuries away from being fully terraformed. But Mars had the premier university in the star system.

But, after a bit of soul searching and some looking around at the prospect for work on Earth, she'd taken the job and had not looked back.

It was Pat's fresh perspective that had shaken things up. Her experiences with MIT's project had been picked apart by Alexi and his team. They'd found a few areas they'd overlooked, but in comparing notes, Pat had pointed out that the best place to do the work was away from gravitational interference.

Which meant a lab in space. Which costs money. A lot of money. But many physics experiments couldn't be done on the ground. Which was why the team had to share the station with the university.

The university hadn't been interested in funding their own dedicated space station. They had picked up a little corporate sponsorship but not enough to pay the bills. It was only when they'd picked up a small Lagroose space station and platform for pennies during the Lagroose breakup that they'd been able to move forward.

The university had wanted a station of their own; dozens of professors and grad students had sensitive projects that needed to be performed in null G. But none of them were organized; Alexi's team was. They'd managed to get their foot in the door first.

From there it had been just a matter of moving in by renting a shuttle and then digging into the project.

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