Imagine This: Planetary Deconstruction Engineer

On one of my recent trips, I was able to visit a few people and interview them about life in the year 2417. My third interview was with the husband of the woman I first met from Brazil. His name is Mike-7003691. This is his story.

NAME:

Mike-7003691

AGE:

42

HOMETOWN:

Sao Paulo, Brazil

EDUCATION:

Bachelor of Physics at the University of São Paulo

Masters of Control Engineering at MIT – Brazil

Certificate in Deconstruction Engineering at the Federal Institute of São Paulo

OCCUPATION:

Planetary Deconstruction Engineering Director (18 years)

PLACE OF WORK:

Alpha Centauri B System

Well, most of my neighbors hate me now. It all started about a decade ago when the International Parliament deemed the last animal to be a non-human person. I had secured a license to own a pet and the law didn’t apply to me. I was among the last few citizens whose application was sealed before the legislation to struck down the law. And since we had a no grandfather clause in the global constitution, I was allowed to keep my dog, Vicki. This is where the story became quiet absurd.

I was summoned in a Court of Justice in Sao Paulo because I heard my pet was suing me. But it was not my pet at all. A group of non-human Activists had sued me on my pet’s behalf. I couldn’t ignore it and within a few hours, the Federal Police was picking up Vicki. They told me I couldn’t speak to her until the proceedings had completed. Well, my pet argued over my long work hours almost every day and said nothing about feeling like a captive. I’m still considering letting him go no matter what happens with the case. But I worry about how his life will be in the open jungle of this world.

I’ve been married to Martina-6465217 for 18 years and as a Planetary Deconstruction Engineer it’s a little hard on the two of us because we want to have children by the time we turn sixty-five.

Alpha Centauri B is the next big thing. Everybody I know applied for the job after Earth got the contract. I still can’t believe it. 47 terrestrial planets! It will take us about 200 years to finish the contract. Good god, I wish I could live that long. To see what our own civilization looks like after we finish the project. The amount of wealth produced each year, according to a report from the Office of Consumer Information, is equal to all currencies ever produced in human history!

I won the jobs lottery, so instead of having to do a job that was crucial to mankind, I was permitted to choose what I wanted. And instantly I jumped into engineering. Corrupt AI government administrators look out for people who give them things…competition is fierce 130,000,000 applied for 1,560,000 posts which are selected by the bots, cold and calculating but corrupt bureaucrats. I got lucky.

I still cannot believe we gave them [the AI’s] rights just for them to be worse than us. And they pretty much run every department in government except for the executive and legislative branches. They run all our courts and all of the prisons in the multi-planet system.

Every deployment is hard on us, but I think about the opportunities I’m opening for my wife and children. It takes three months to go and three months to come back. And people generally don’t like being away from each other that long. I think it makes our love grow stronger. Like a sailor going on deployment.

Well, the transportation system is not that hard to explain, but you’d need a degree in physics to understand it. Basically, we’re converted to pure energy and kind of ‘time travel’ to our destination using “strings” in the universe. It’s instantaneous to us but for everybody else, time moves on. It takes about a month of energy syphoned from the sun to power the engines, which are spaced out in ten billion kilometer increments, that allow us to jump from one point to another what feels like at an instant. There are millions of jumps between earth and Alpha Centauri, I think.

I takes the Z-Line to Alpha Centauri, where I’m a Planetary Deconstruction Engineering Director. My team mines the resources of entire planets and brings them to other planets in the system for consumption. My current planet is XC-38789, a small rock rich with minerals. We’ll even end up taking its core at the end – 200 some years later – after we’ve taken everything from its thick crust.

The devices we use are gargantuan – about . They sequence a gravitational field and reduce the weight of large sections of continents and flings them into space. This is a dangerous thing because by doing so, we slightly alter the planet’s course around its stars. It can literally be flung out into space if we take too much at a time. After we stabilize the planet in its new orbit, we do it again.

About 99.99 percent of the resources are sold to other systems about a tenth of a 1 percent are sold in our solar system. Hazards and internal correction software…which allows calculations for our gravity field generator…lets us do this without plummeting giant piles of minerals on the planet. And according to a field report, we’ll increase the mass of Earth by 1/10th of 1 percent, which will also alter our orbit a little.

Well, I have to go. It’s been an honor talking to you. Just remember this though, if not for our new technology, the journey to Alpha Centauri B orbit would take about 100 years, at an average velocity of approximately 13411 km/s, about 4.5% the speed of light, and another 4.39 years would be necessary for the data to reach Earth. We have made a massive leap in this era. And I hope to see some of the fruits of my labor.