October 23, 2020
Interview with Rome II - Part 6 of 9
As Steve Fisch and I get the scripts ready to sell Rome's Revolution as a streaming series, he asked me for a lot of background information that I did not have. So I took some time out to interview Rome and Rei. Rome was very talkative so I had to break up her interview into two parts. Here is the second half of Rome's interview, part 6 of 9.
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Rome: We positioned our equipment at each of the five Lagrange points in the Tabit system, giving us an effective aperture of nearly 10 light hours across. With our interpolation algorithms, we should have been able to observe the events that occurred at Winfall roughly equal to observing the Sun from inside the orbit of Venus.
Perry: Surely that would have been enough to spot a Stareater.
Rome: You would think so but unfortunately, it couldn’t have been. Nobody knew what to expect. The geometry was all wrong. Based upon what we observed at Tabit, the Stareater would have come up from behind Winfall. All the crew at Escobar would have seen would have been the stars in the background being occluded and then Winfall disappearing. They couldn’t have known what they were looking at.
Perry: So what would you have done? If you were them?
Rome: Well, if we hadn’t packed up our equipment too soon and if Rei hadn’t come along, and we did observe exactly what I described, we would have come to the conclusion that we didn’t really know much more than we did before we left. We would have gathered up our equipment and flown even farther out and deployed our instrumentation with a much greater aperture.
Perry: And that’s what you think they did?
Rome: I don’t know. It’s the only thing I can think of. Space is a dangerous place. The longer and farther out you go, the greater the chance for disaster. That was one thing that the designers of Rei’s Ark got right.
Perry: That disaster is inevitable?
Rome: Exactly. Rather than sink their resources into building a super spaceship, the Essessoni built one as simply as possible and devoted their resources into making sure that each individual survived. The Vuduri are the opposite. If something happens to one of our starships, everyone aboard dies.
Perry: Do you think we’ll ever find out what happened to them? To the Cobol?
Rome: Maybe but for today, it’s just an unsolved mystery. I suppose you would say we were lucky that Rei came along and OMCOM got it into his electronic head to engineer the VIRUS units. While it created Planet OMCOM, it also allowed us to build and exploit the star probes and uncover the secret of the Stareaters.
Perry: Right. So… discovering and eventually making peace with the Stareaters. Do you think that was your greatest achievement?
Rome: No. Not at all. My greatest achievements are my children.
(Perry smiles.)
Perry: Wouldn’t every parent say that?
Rome: I suppose but I mean it literally. If it wasn’t for Aason, we wouldn’t be here right now. The Stareaters would have destroyed the Earth. And Aason went to Heaven to rescue his sister. The word he brought back has given everyone on every planet a renewed sense of purpose.
Perry: And why is that?
Tomorrow, part 7
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