The Greatest Commodity (First Draft)

The Experiment

The gravitic drive was ready for its first test, slated for next week. It was of a revised design, nobody wanted to repeat whatever had happened before.

It had been decades ago that the USS Aquila disappeared without a trace on the eve of a gravitics test. The new drive would soon be loaded aboard another spacecraft for the first test in decades.

A middle-aged man, Professor Juan Fisher, sat at in a chair, lounging after a long day's work on the prototype. The walls of the room were a dark wood color, an old incandescent lamp lit the room with moody tones.

"This is going to make us very wealthy." Said Fisher's young assistant, Xi Chao, a tall young man of Chinese descent with a clean shaven face and jet black hair.

"Only if it succeeds," Fisher warned. "If it doesn't, this whole project is dead meat."

The holovision projected standard news. The usual stuff, a hurricane impacting the east coast of the Americas; another prominent celebrity from the 90's dying of old age and the side effects of the drugs they took so much back then; another politician saying something stupid. The usual stuff.

Chao looked at the screen for a moment. "Do you think things will ever improve in this world?" He asked.

"Not until we can fix this damned overpopulation," Fisher said, frowning. "We've got too many people. But death-rates have been minuscule for centuries, no matter how small the birth-rate, the population just keeps growing."

"How can we fix that?"

"Many ways. They could be sent to the colonies, expensive, but possible; we could set an age limit for the global population requiring mandatory executions for anyone over a certain age, or we could just start indiscriminately killing people. I prefer the first option."

Chao sighed. Earth was a densely crowded world. The majority of people living in cities were crammed into apartments the size of a closet; only the lucky few, the rich, had access to homes with more than fifty square meters of space. Those who lived rurally had more space to live in but found the opportunities to be few beyond cities. Were it not for the robots, most of Earth's cities would have degenerated into crime-infested slums by now.

"Do you think gravitics will change all this?" Chao asked, looking hopeful.

"Of course!" Fisher boomed enthusiastically. "We'll be able to build ships the size of cities, and carry millions of people from one planet to another within a trip of only a few minutes! It will revolutionize space travel, the most distant worlds in our solar system will suddenly be only a few seconds of travel away. And the stars, too, will be within our grasp -- we'll still be subject to the limitations of relativity, but it will be possible to make a trip across the entire galaxy within mere hours of ship time, though time dilation will make the trip quite senseless unless our society becomes immortal."

The young assistant's face brightened. Only twenty years old, he was still filled with youthful optimism, and the sheltered nature of his upbringing had made him soft to the plight of the world. He was visibly glad to hear of a solution.

"How is the drive, by the way," Chao asked.

"Just fine as far as I can see. Lewis is running some checks on it right now. Making sure all the components are working right."

"So there won't be a repeat of the Aquila incident, right?"

"Right. If another ship disappears testing this thing... we'll be finished. No second chances for gravitic technology." Fisher said. Looking worried.

"What do you suppose happened to the Aquila?"

Fisher shrugged. "Probably some error in the drive either sent them flying off into intergalactic space in some unknown direction or perhaps the field was unstable and they were ripped apart down to the atoms."