Chapter 16: Chapter 16: ICARUS – Through the Rings

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Icarus was working in the hangar redesigning an eleph-ANT. He knew Ship was on his way up so he rolled underneath the large mechanical machine with a wrench in one hand.

Timing his movements, he rolled out from underneath as Ship arrived. “What do you think, Ship?”

Ship stared at the large minivan-sized eleph-ANT, its insides pulled out – wires, motors and electronics strewn across the floor of the hangar. It had eight cables connected to it from the ceiling and eight connected to the floor. They were large cables too – the kind that could be used to lift it up from the ground.

Ship turned his head to Icarus. “You know, you can’t leave this spacecraft? Hapticgraphic projections only work while in this ship.”

Icarus stood up, wiping his pants. “I’m trying something different. Have a look inside.”

Icarus opened the large door on the back of the eleph-ANT. He had to jump a little to get inside as the door was quite a distance from the floor. He turned around and put his hand out for Ship, pulling him inside too. It was dark inside the eleph-ANT.

“Are you ready?” Icarus asked as he walked into the machine.

Icarus flicked the switch on the wall. The room lit up. It looked like the inside of a fighter plane. There were two seats, one in front of the other. The seats were low, and hard to get into. They were the sort that held you in place. A control stick was secured in front of each seat and various buttons and leavers were within arm’s reach. The inside walls of the eleph-ANT were covered in screens.

Icarus pointed at the front seat. “This will be my cockpit. I’ll be able to remote-control eleph-ANTs from within here.” He pointed to the co-pilot’s seat. “You can sit here if you want. None of the controls do anything yet, but at least we’ll be able to talk on this adventure.”

Ship took a seat and belted himself into place.

Icarus knew Ship could remote-control the eleph-ANT if he wanted, regardless of the controls in front of him not being in working order.

Icarus nodded at Ship. “I have an eleph-ANT waiting in the airlock. We’ll close the doors and launch it out into space.” He walked forward to sit in his pilot’s seat and spotted a printout he had made earlier – a small sticker. “Oh, I have to do something first.”

Icarus picked up the sticker, opened the door of the cockpit and jumped out the door. He ran across the hangar towards the airlock, his cartoon legs hopping. When he was about seven metres from the eleph-ANT he jumped, stretching his arm out, almost as if he was dunking a basketball. He slammed the sticker down on the top of the eleph-ANT’s nose and then landed, his momentum sliding him across the ground. He teleported back into the cockpit mid-slide, fading out as he did.

The sticker read Mark-One.

“That sticker was real. So I couldn’t teleport it to the eleph-ANT. Now close the airlock.” Icarus said, as he arrived.

Ship closed the airlock door, flicking a random switch in front of him to give Icarus a sense of realism.

Icarus pressed several buttons in turn. The screens all around them turned on. It looked like they were inside the eleph-ANT labelled Mark-One.

Back in the airlock the magnetic legs of the Mark-One turned on, anchoring it to the floor. The eleph-ANT that Icarus and Ship were in lifted off the ground, the eight cables connected to the roof doing their job.

Ship flicked a random switch and opened the outside door of the airlock. The Mark-One remained stationary as the air rushed out.

Icarus took the controls. “Here we go,” he announced, while pushing the control stick forward.

The Mark-One ran, all six legs moving in tandem. It jumped out of the airlock and floated down towards the rings of the gas giant.

Icarus pressed a button. The two back legs of the Mark-One turned to point backwards, directly behind the eleph-ANT. Icarus pushed the throttle lever forward and the Mark-One rocketed forward.

Icarus watched as the eleph-ANT raced towards the gas giant. The illusion of the rings around the gas giant started to disappear. Icarus could see large asteroids and rocks.

They were several kilometres away.

“How big are those rocks, Lex?” Icarus asked, pointing at one of the large objects.

The orb appeared in the eleph-ANT with Icarus and Ship. The AI added a chart to the screen in front of Icarus. It showed the large rock they could see was about the size of Mount Everest. It was huge and it was moving fast around the gas planet in a clockwise direction – left to right from their reference point and orientation.

Icarus moved the control stick. The Mark-One turned to face the orbit of the rings. Icarus increased the throttle, trying to match the spin and aim for the Everest-sized object.

“Icarus, you can’t move that fast,” Ship warned.

Icarus thought for a moment. Ship was right. He needed to pick another object to land on. The Mark-One was getting closer to the ring, which to him looked like he was approaching a bunch of floating boulders in space. There were millions of large asteroids in front of the eleph-ANT Mark-One. Between all the large objects was a subtle haze which he assumed was dust particles and micro asteroids. The Everest-sized object he had hoped to land on was covered in ice.

Relative to the asteroids orbiting the gas giant, the Mark-One was moving too slowly. Any impact would destroy it, but it was too late to turn around.

Icarus pointed at a new asteroid. “I have an idea.”

He angled the nose of the Mark-One towards one of the solid-looking asteroids, tracking it as it moved. He pressed a button on the controls. Out of the nose of the Mark-One shot a cable, striking the asteroid dead centre. Dust and micro-asteroids flew everywhere. He hoped he had lodged it into something solid. Icarus took a breath of anticipation as he waited to find out. It didn’t take long – the cable was pulled taut and the Mark-One lurched forward, pulled by the asteroid it was connected to.

Icarus and Ship rocked in their seats. “I bet you didn’t expect that,” remarked Icarus excitedly. “The cables connected to this eleph-ANT give us the full sensory experience.”

The Mark-One spun wildly. All six of its leg engines ignited, firing hard to correct the spin. Icarus worked hard to orient its legs towards the incoming river of rocks but he was fighting a losing battle as the Mark-One almost spun out of control. His reaction time was too slow. “Ship, do you mind!” he yelled in frustration.

Almost like magic the Mark-One started to gain its composure. The spinning arrested and its legs orientated themselves towards the incoming asteroid.

The Mark-One wasn’t flailing wildly anymore, but it was still hurtling towards the incoming river of rocks, all six legs fighting to slow the incoming asteroid. A few milliseconds passed.

And then impact, followed by an explosion of dust. And the Mark-One bouncing off the asteroid.

Icarus fired the engines again, turning it around to angle the Mark-One back towards the asteroid for a second landing attempt.

Icarus could feel the excitement in his hands. He held the control stick tightly, the constant squeezing putting indents into its leather grip. He hadn’t felt like this in a while – the thrill of the real world; the danger the Mark-One experienced; the creativity he had with harpooning the massive asteroid; the great skill involved with manoeuvring its legs to face the incoming ring. He smiled to himself.

At that moment – while Icarus was deep in thought – an asteroid about the size of a tanker truck struck the Mark-One. It was completely and utterly destroyed.

The lights turned on. Ship and Icarus stopped shaking in their cockpit. They were gently lowered back to the ground.

Icarus cursed himself for spending too much time thinking about his achievements and not enough time with his head in the game. “Sorry Ship, I think I know what to do now.”

Why was he shooting from the hip? Preparation and research were what he excelled at. Icarus found himself caught up in the excitement of exploring a new world. It wasn’t like him. He needed to understand the situation better. He needed to be deliberate and methodical.

He wiggled out of his seat; he had become stuck with all the jostling of controlling the Mark-One. He grabbed a permanent marker and the stack of stickers that had been printed and ran from the hollowed-out eleph-ANT, towards the hangar airlock. Two eleph-ANTs were waiting near the door. He looked around, finding a shelf with stacks of the smaller ants. He plucked two from the shelf. With a pen he wrote on each of them Mark-Two-A and Mark-Two-B and placed them both in the middle of the airlock. Before teleporting, he walked past the two eleph-ANTs waiting outside the airlock. He pressed a sticker onto each of them labelled Mark-Three and Mark-Four before teleporting back inside his makeshift eleph-ANT control centre.

“Ship, we’re going to find out what we’re dealing with,” Icarus said, buckling himself back into his seat.

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They launched the Mark-Two-A and B out of the airlock. Icarus took control of the Mark-Two-A. “Ship, can you control the Two-B and send it to the other side of the ring?”

Icarus sent his ANT to the top of the ring (relative to their perspective) and Ship the bottom. As the ANTs fell towards the gas giant they scanned the rings, building a map of the rings as they looked for a place to land.

Icarus pointed at the screen in front of them. “Are you seeing that, Ship?”

Ship turned his head to see what Icarus was talking about. “The bands?”

“Yes, it looks like there are seven bands of rings. They are travelling at different speeds.”

Icarus replaced the first-person view of his ANTs travelling through space with the 3D map of the rings. The rings were made up of seven distinct bands. The outermost ring, the one that had destroyed the Mark-One, was the least uniform. It was made up of asteroids of many different sizes loosely stuck together. That’s why he had struggled to navigate that ring – the lack of uniformity made for an impossible task.

The second and third bands looked the same. They were both made up of fine dust particles. Both had many tiny fragments but there was a large empty space between both bands. Icarus thought about it for a second. It was odd. Almost as if both those bands were originally one. But a moon had cut through the middle, turning one large ring into two very separate bands.

“They must have once been a single ring. Both the second and third rings are moving in at the same speed,” Icarus noted.

The fourth ring was the one Icarus thought would be the most fun to explore. It was made up of many ice rocks and was very uniform in mass – roughly the size of large tanker trucks, lots of them. But in different shapes – some round, and some long and jagged. He thought about how easy it would be to jump from asteroid to asteroid.

As Icarus’s ANT drew closer to the fourth ring he realised it wasn’t truly a ring after all. It was made up of many small moons. They were all big enough that their gravity made them a spherical shape. There were thousands of them, all evenly spaced.

Icarus wondered how it was possible for stable orbits like this to have formed. That shouldn’t be possible. He looked up at the orb floating near him. “Lex, do you know how these large moons stay in orbit?”

Two words appeared in front of Icarus: Insufficient data.

“Just guess, Lex.”

The orb flashed red, its subtle glow lighting up the small space they were in.

Icarus glared at Lex. A frustrated look on his face. “Give me a probability on whether this is natural then.”

It was Ship who answered, obviously annoyed at Lex’s inability to give a straight answer too. “Lex believes it’s natural. But he’s only seventy-two per cent confident about that.

Icarus hated how Lex responded sometimes. For a supercomputer he didn’t give many answers. Icarus placed his annoyance aside for a second and continued on his mission. He knew where he wanted to go now. He smacked his hand down on the launch button and the Mark-Three eleph-ANT flew out of the airlock.

“Ship, how long will it take the Mark-Three to get to the fourth ring?”

“Twenty-seven minutes.”

Icarus smiled. “Perfect.” He turned his head towards the orb in the corner. “Lex, map me a path to the fourth ring. The one with the most uniform asteroids. Project it on my screen as a waypoint. And pick a spot for me to aim for. Aim for somewhere with lots of large truck-sized rocks that are within jumping distance of each other.”

Several arrows appeared on Icarus’s screen. A countdown timer. He manoeuvred the Mark-Three in the direction of the arrows. As he drew closer a red target mark appeared around one of the drifting rocks.

He locked onto his target and fired the rockets on each of the six legs, slowing the Mark-Three’s speed relative to the huge asteroid and matching the speed and angle of the target asteroid.

“Touchdown in three, two, one,” Ship announced.

The Mark-Three and the asteroid connected. But a lot of dust and rocks flew off the asteroid near where the Mark-Three’s feet were.

“You’ve connected to the asteroid,” advised Ship, “but there are a lot of smaller objects that are loosely gravitationally bound to the asteroid.”

Not raising his hands off the control, Icarus replied, “Is there a risk of us just smashing through an asteroid that consists of only small rocks held together by weak gravity?”

“I don’t think so. Lex has mapped you a path. The series of way points he created only contacts asteroids which are solid.”

And with that, Icarus jerked the control stick forward. The Mark-Three took off, running along one side of the asteroid.

On each of the Mark-Three’s six legs were three mechanical claws. As each of its legs connected to the asteroid they hooked into it, enabling the Mark-Three to run freely without the risk of losing contact.

“This is the part I was excited for,” Icarus said, a boyish grin on his face.

The Mark-Three was about six more steps away from the edge of the asteroid. It ran. There was another asteroid across the gap of space. The Mark-Three jumped, floating and then landing, dust and particles flying off with the impact. Icarus didn’t slow it down. It ran across the bottom of this new asteroid before jumping. This time the Mark-Three needed to spin slightly in order to connect with the new asteroid. It spun around, the tiny thrusters on its right side firing to position the machine appropriately. It connected, the legs locking into place as it continued to run.

Icarus was loving every minute of this. It was a million times better than the 2D obstacle games he used to love playing as a kid. This was 3D and the physics weren’t a simulation. It was real.

He had been running through the ring for hours now – he’d crossed the entire layer and was at the edge of the fourth ring.

“The Mark-Three is almost out of energy,” Ship said.

Ship was right. The Mark-Three would barely get back to the ship. They might have to send a few ANTs to collect it.

Icarus stared through the eyes of the Mark-Three, looking from its perspective. Many moons made up the next ring around this gas giant. Through the cameras he could see five in close proximity. It didn’t look possible. Such a stable orbit of large bodies, without them coming into contact with each other.

“Are these orbits stable over hundreds of years?” Icarus asked.

“I believe so,” Ship replied, not wanting to annoy Icarus with an uninformative answer from Lex.

Icarus pointed at the moons orbiting the gas giant. “I want to explore those moons.”

“They’re too far apart to jump from object to object.”

As Ship explained how it wasn’t possible to explore each of the moons using an eleph-ANT, Icarus began to ponder. He wondered whether this gas giant could be his world.

His mind was flooded with ideas. It was in the Goldilocks Zone. The moons orbited the gas giant every twenty-four and a half hours. That was close enough to Earth’s day and night cycle that Earth life wouldn’t need much engineering to make it work. The rings had more than enough resources to build everything he needed.

He thought about plans – running a cable from moon to moon, enabling both communication and an easy way to move from moon to moon. Over time he could build a ring world using up all the resources in a few of the ring bands to build a permanent structure around the gas giant.

Icarus turned to Ship. “We are going to seed these moons.”

Ship shrugged, then nodded. “Okay, so what should we name it?”

Icarus thought for a while. About the gas giant. About the rings. About a book he once read called Ring World. While he thought, he took control of the Mark-Three once more. The Mark-Three let go of the asteroid it was connected to and drifted up into space. The engines fired and it began travelling back towards the ship.

There was a large asteroid he hadn’t noticed while he was distracted in thought. It destroyed the Mark-Three.

Icarus wasn’t bothered. He let go of the controls, turned around and said, “Let’s call this place … Titan.”

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