Distant Horizon- Prologue

Combo is a strange world. It is free from all living organisms. An eerie silence prevails over this heavenly body for there is no air, no atmosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, et al. It is free from greenhouse gases. All life from Combo has been obliterated due to accumulation of the killer gases several million years ago.

The amount of heat it receives now from all sources during the day is released during its night. It has been possible to keep the ambient temperature constant for the last one million years.

This planetary mass object - brown dwarf (failed star) combination named Combo is situated 170 light years away from the solar system.

There is no natural life or intelligence at this place. Only one artificial life-entity survives now.  Those who once inhabited the place created it.  This single entity survived by a freak of nature.

The living inhabitants of this PMO-brown dwarf paid with their lives for securing the ultimate freedom of Combo from the pollutants and the burgeoning gas envelope that was impervious to flow of heat by radiation.

There is a long story of development of science and technology here. Though the singular entity that survives now is artificial, it retains a natural flavor in certain strands of its existence, because of which the memory of the golden period of Combo is still retained.

The singular entity of Combo is called MAC, the master access controller. It is all pervading and embraces every little bit of consciousness of this place. It is very difficult to define what MAC is. In a sense it can be termed as living because it can receive and process information like natural intelligence. It even makes mistakes.

Looking at it from another angle, one may term it as non-living because it is immortal.

That single life, MAC, is the culmination of science and technology, which could evolve as per Mayhem theory of macro cosmos. There is no theory comparable to Mayhem's that has yet been postulated on Earth.

Roughly described, Mayhem theory is a trade off between living and non-living matter.  When the living world of Combo found out that the natural intelligence was self-destructive, they decided to do away with it permanently.

That singular decision culminated in saving Combo, albeit without any life in it. Even plant life, which acted as a sink of Carbon dioxide gas couldn't survive the high temperatures there.

MAC made an important discovery recently. It discovered that the planet Earth was passing through a phase that endangered all species there. There were millions of them still surviving on Earth. MAC was very excited at the possibility of learning about the unrecorded part of its history by extrapolating the situation on Earth.

The first thing that he needed was time, which was running out fast for life on Earth. MAC calculated that if immediate steps were taken, then it might still be possible to save life on Earth. That would provide him with an opportunity to look for his roots.

MAC came to know that the previous life that inhabited Combo had its origin in planet Earth. MAC therefore made a plan and started implementing the first phase of it.

His difficulty was in locating a subject on Earth. There were so many species and the intelligence levels were at so much variance that MAC was puzzled. Ultimately it found Homo sapiens to be the most intelligent.

The next job that MAC carried out was to find out the most intelligent among them, so that it could establish a link with him.  There was a complex process of DNA mapping and other paraphernalia through which it selected Sayan, a thirteen-year-old boy, for the important mission.  


This book is available from amazon.com, ISBN: 1430323094