At any rate, it looks like the war with the Outliners is going to escalate, again. What does it take anyway for people to stop fighting? Nothing can cure that I guess. There’s over twenty wars going on throughout the system right now, as defined by the UN. Most of them are between UN members squabbling territorial disputes. I don’t get it. We have all the energy we could ever need, just about all the resources we’ll ever need, and still people fight. I can even understand the Eugenics wars. Wars of ideologies never end. Wars of conquest will always be here too I suppose. Maybe people just get bored.

So, in case you don’t know, the Outliners attacked a civilian cruise liner between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. They were on course to hit the Sphere’s, marvel of engineering, and were ambushed.

Not to go off topic, but I just have to comment on the AI that named these people. Outliners??? A statistical anomaly where all but a few Sentients are members of the Sentient Accords. So, the AI who did the research named them Outliners and it caught on. I don’t mean to belabor this point too long, but come on.

Anyway, its rather gloomy around the University today. The news hit the wires and nets sometime this morning about the cruise ship. All 800 people on board lost. I don’t know anyone that had family or friends on it though, thank god. 

The biggest question I have is why. Why would the CY’s, AI’s and others that make up the Outliner groups bother? They are mostly insane Cyborg’s really, only a handful of AI’sjoined up with them and a few non-approved Sentients that think they deserve sentient status. That was quite the shock with that happened. The AI council freaked out, well, as most as AI’s can freak out that is.

The outliner groups, there are multiple factions and they often fight among themselves, live somewhere in the outer system. Mostly they move around from one hole to another. It’s really a wild west out there. There’s nothing really terribly valuable out there, the inner system has everything it needs to live quite comfortably. Every once in a while a new group gets a Bigelow station or some other type of habitation ship and heads out there to start up a colony. Most just want to be left alone. I even heard of one group that took one of the old Titan class habitation ships, refitted it, put in a dome for agriculture and headed out to deep space, beyond the system itself. Crazy.

Anyway, no government really wants the trouble of dealing with the outer system. Every once in awhile the Outliners do something like this, attack a ship or a station or something, and then the inner system musters up a fleet to smack them around a bit. Guess it’s time for that again.

This time though, the fleet is 100% American. Well, Western and Eastern American anyway. There is a Republic of Texas ship going too but it’s only a fast frigate, whatever that means. I’m mostly paraphrasing from my friend’s message. This won’t leave the America’s vulnerable of course, we’ve still plenty of military to go around. The one good thing since the split of the U.S. into regional countries was the keeping of a unified military force. Kinda like NATO I guess.

I’ll be following this with regular updates from my friend in the fleet. He’s actually fairly high up, don’t want to say how high, in the chain on the Ulysses, so I’ll know things pretty quickly. Lets hope this is over soon and doesn’t blow up into another system war. God knows what the Outliners have been doing for the past 50 years, since the last time they decided to start a brouhaha .

About 25 years ago, some engineer came up with a brilliant use for an EM shield, translucent metal, artificial gravity fields and a beach. At least that was the model I was on. To whoever that was that created these things, thank you! Here’s my experience on one of these marvels.

So, Allister, my friend at the university, called me up and said, lets go for a ride. I said, ok, I didn’t have any work to do anyway. We met outside and drove over the DC regional space port. We didn’t have time for an Space Elevator, so we commissioned a rocket transport to take us to a station that I hadn’t heard of before. Allister called it the Bubble Station. I thought it was an odd name, it really didn’t look like a bubble. It was an odd design, five type three Bigelow modules stacked horizontally on top of each other. From each junction point there were four long docking collars extending outward for about a mile in seperate directions. Attached to each collar were anywhere from two to a half a dozen, what can only be described as, bubbles. They were, of course, Bubble Yacht’s. For some reason I just had never gotten to see these things. Allister told me that they are exclusively for the ultra rich. There were only around 100 of these things in existance.

How we, two ordinary universities professors, were getting on this thing was simply beyond me. And I didn’t ask once. I didn’t want to spoil the moment with the logistics of how this moment came to be. We docked with the station and made our way to collar 5. The ride on the space car was almost as intense as the whole experience.  We went by three other yachts on our way to ours. They were sights to behold. Each one was roughly 1 acre and each one had totally different interiors. Allister would later tell me that there were other models on differen collars that were much smaller. The acre sized ones here were the biggest on this station. But that someone had once built a ten acre bubble yacht. Incredible! No one ever talks about it so I’m sure it’s hidden away in some corner of the system. A mini-translucent bubble world.

The first we saw had a small forest on it! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Something as simple as a forest. There was a nice lodge and a small cottage. I could see birds flying through the trees and even some squirls in the trees. I even spotted a large tree house up in the trees. There didn’t seem to be anyone home but I could only imagine what it would be like to drift through the heavens sitting on that porch.

The second ship had two structures on it. One was large house with a partial roof. If you have your own atmosphere, why do you need a roof after all. The other building was, amazingly, what looked like a farm building. I couldn’t tell how far it went down but it went up nearly to the top of the bubble. Little bit of an eye sore if you ask me but the intention is clear. This bubble was meant to be self sustaining. Some billionare’s idea to detach one day and sail off never to be heard from again most likly.

The third ship was stunning. There was a small island in the center of the ship. Water surrounded. There were a few small row boats and even a three man sail boat on the water. Imagine that, a boat inside a bubble floating through space. I could see a few people sitting on the boats, one of them waved.

We made it the end of collar five, got out of the car and went to the docking ring. A few moments through the interlock chambers and there we were. On a beach. In a bubble. In Space. Wow. This one was just as neat as the others. A small beach, small amount of water to simulate an ocean and a few small cottages lining the shore. It was simply incredible.

The owner of the bubble came out to greet us. Or at least I thought it was the owner, he seemed like he was. He immediatly introduced himself simply as Tom and began to give us a tour. He never asked who we were, he must have already known. Tom walked us along the beach, describing the construction of the ship, how the EM fields work, the translusent metal, the propulsion system built beneath us. It was really incredible to hear about these ships. Aparantly, most of the big ones are our in the system somewhere. A few are even serving as ultra luxury hotels.

It was to my dismay that we weren’t going to go anywhere. The ride on the bubble ship was more of a sitting on the beach and looking at the view of earth below us. Still very neat. What’s even neater is Tom told us that sometimes they’ll suspend the gravity and let you float around a bit. They have to lock down the water so it doesn’t go all over the place and do a few safty procedures but it would be very cool to experience.

We sat on the beach for awhile and headed home. It was a fun day to be sure. As soon as I got home I started this post. I’ll be looking for one of the hotels next. I think I want to plan a vacation to a bubble hotel, I saw that one is currently at the Jupiter system. That would be an amazing view!