The Star Registry
And the Blockchain Explorer
Ancient history, really, but the prequel to this story was rooted in pub life in good old Glasgow.
Manny, who liked to mispronounce his own name as Manly, modelled himself more or less consciously on Begby, an incendiary character from a film based in the same city. He viewed all of his drinking buddies as less macho than himself, but none more so than Sully.
Sullivan treated the ladies with a level of respect bordering on deference, and had been known to order lager and lime, before having such feeble behaviour mocked out of him. These two characteristics alone gave Manny ample licence to exercise his virulent homophobia by taking the piss out of Sully on a more or less nightly basis.
Nonetheless, he viewed Sully as one of his chums, so when the lady from the Star Registry accosted him in the Shopping Centre, he found the perfect dual solution to celebrating Sully’s upcoming 40th birthday, while simultaneously continuing his mockery with the best prank ever.
“I bought you something Sully. There’s two twin stars in a distant Galaxy whose names will always remind everyone of you”.
Sully accepted the certificate with superficial good grace, while secretly vowing to spend a lot less time mixing with these tosspots.
Ted licked his finger and waved it in front of the scanner to pay for his meal and that of his colleague Moira. From time to time this method wouldn’t work and he would have to subject himself to a pin prick on the finger. He hated the sight of blood, so avoided this way of paying whenever possible.
Thankfully he had never been in the embarrassing situation of having his DNA declined due to absence of linked funds, but he had seen it happen to others once or twice.
Moira was new to Planet Disney and full of questions.
“Why is the Interstellar Forward Base stuck in the middle of a giant theme park?”
“How well do you know your history of the Shuttle?”
“Well I know that it was funded by the Founder, after he had run out of techno projects on Earth and set his sights on the stars”.
“You’ve been watching too many infomercials. The Founder was on a quest for money, and the Shuttle was just a byproduct”.
“There was a time before Universal Ethereal Currency was linked to everyone’s DNA, when it was still possible to steal, hoard, hide and generally exploit monetary value. Back then individual stashes had to be kept in bank accounts or, if they were online, they were protected by cryptographic algorithms.
Quantum computing was in its infancy, so the Founder set about building an Artificial Intelligence cluster based on a quantum computer and pointed it at a specific task. Cracking the cryptographic puzzles associated with private addresses. If you didn’t control the address, it wasn’t really your money, and he had the idea of taking a tithe, or a tenth, of what was held in every known address.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“It worked well enough, but the machines kept crashing for the weirdest of reasons. The chipsets were getting covered with a fine sand, which seemed to come from nowhere. This triggered a much more fundamental discovery, which was that the quantum field he was generating was becoming entangled with some remote location and bringing back material from that place. In trying to rob the public he discovered teleportation”.
“That’s not how history records the discovery”.
“Who wrote, or rather re-wrote, the history? The Founder’s AI scribes, of course. Anyway, to answer your first question, the sandy material turned out to be coming from this very planet. They were able to scale up and send a beacon back the other way, which could then be tracked from Earth.”
“I don’t get it. How did Disney get involved?”
“They were able to fund the next stage of development. And it made logical sense for a few reasons. They already had a Disneyland and a Disney World, so a Disney Planet was a natural next step. The Founder knew they would be interested. Did you know that Disney Planet used to be called Pluto?”
“There’s something special about this place. No-one knows why, but it’s like a hub, connected not only with the Earth but with infinite other locations around the Universe. That’s why it does double duty as a theme park and a forward station for further exploration. And now you know why the Shuttle’s real name is the Blockchain Explorer, though most people don’t have a clue about where that comes from”.
“Can I see it?”
“Sure, I think there’s a reconnaissance mission heading out this afternoon. We can take a walk over there when we finish”.
Moira shook hands briefly with the astronauts, but they were preoccupied with pre-mission checks.
The Stellar Shuttle was something of a disappointment when compared to the wide-bodied transport which had brought her here (along with a hundred tourists). It looked like nothing more than an old-fashioned simulator pod. In theory she knew that it didn’t actually need to take off and fly anywhere, but if she didn’t know better she would have considered it a scam.
“Where do they get the names for these star systems” she asked, while puzzling over the mission manifest on the screen.
“Most are just numeric, but they grandfathered in some human names from the old Star Registry. Why do you ask?”
She stifled a laugh. She didn’t fancy going into her Scottish heritage or why she was seeing the fruition of a decades-old practical joke in bold titles on the mission manifest. It was one of those amusements which would take half an hour to explain and would still fall flat. Better to keep it to herself.
In any case, she already had what she came for and could make a full report to her superiors on the suitability of the current Base Commander for his post. Ted had shown a willingness, almost without prompting, to subvert the memory of the Founder and spread slanderous misrepresentations of his motivation and methods. Moira had almost choked on her couscous.
But her career in the Cancel Corps had just taken a giant step forward.
Many thanks for reading!
More sci-fi spec fic below.
