Humanity's Echo

Every comic book has a super-hero to save humanity from the super-villain. I find myself wandering if the hero only exists because of the villain. It seems like whenever there is an extreme, there has to be an equal extreme at the other end of the spectrum. The villain’s super power isn’t usually inferior to that of the hero, but the hero is good and the villain is evil, so the hero is always victorious in the end. I like to think that the world is similar to the comic book in that regard, though I doubt that it is.

The date is January 12, 2069; I am chronicling events as they have happened so future generations will know the truth. The authorities have made every attempt to hide it from the public, and it almost seems as though no one realizes that something is wrong, but someone knows. Someone one knows that irreversible mistakes have been made and that same someone is scrambling to make them selves look innocent while making someone else look guilty. This kind of mistake is the kind that no one ever forgets, as long as there is anyone left; to remember.

Five years ago my team and I were contracted to work on a top secret project; “Project Echo”. We were to design and test theoretical simulations of long-term space travel. Our job was to collaborate with the World Space Alliance on possible missions to distant planets and run simulations of every possible scenario. We weren’t military nor were we astronomers; we were computer programmers with a knack for one thing; designing simulations with millions of possible variables that adhere exactly to the known physical laws. We were experts in our field, perhaps the best in the world. We had worked closely with the aeronautics industry running simulations for anti-inertia containment fields, which seemed to be beyond the constraints of conventional quantum physics. I always felt that we were close, but interests and funding had begun dwindling so the project was halted to pursue research in another direction. I was offered a job doing simulations of new and experimental aircraft propulsion systems, which I was considering. I didn’t know it at the time, but fate had a different hand that I was to be dealt.