Culpepper watched out the window as Guerrero brought the vehicle to a hover over a large clearing. The sun was just beginning to peek over the treetops to the east. In the dim light of dawn, she could see orange and green fruits covering the trees beyond the clearing.

I hope today’s results are better than yesterday’s.

They had visited four locations in the last six days. Two of those had yielded nothing useful. Perhaps a month earlier or a month later, things might have been different, but nothing that was ripe now and suitable for human consumption. They’d found good options at the other two stops, and in each case had stayed an extra day to harvest what they could. But there were still critical nutrients they had to find if they were going to survive the winter. So they kept moving.

A survey drone hovered a hundred feet to their north over another patch of the same clearing. That would mark where Swenson wanted the transponder set for the portal. They had been through the same drill yesterday and the day before: touch down at sunrise; collect as many different samples of fruit and vegetation as they could before Mabel passed overhead and the communication window opened; set the transponder and pack their produce tightly around it; say the word and watch it disappear, leaving a divot ten feet in diameter and two feet deep in the turf.

Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer, would lock onto the transponder as a location reference and use the portal at the base camp to transport the cargo—which included the transponder itself. The rest of the team would then unload the portal as quickly as they could and Swenson would send the transponder, and the divot, back. Using the portal this way was risky, but it was the only practical way to move a significant volume of produce six thousand miles.

The chief problem was that they had no reliable location reference for the reverse transport. It wasn’t as simple as just sending it back where it came from. The spatial relationship between the two endpoints hadn’t changed much, but in the time that had elapsed the planet had rotated around its axis and its sun, and both moons had rotated around the planet. These celestial motions resulted in distortions of the gravity field in the region between the two endpoints. The impact on the portal technology was not insignificant.

The transit portal leveraged a novel understanding of physics that translated a spherical volume, in zero time, from one place to another. The amount of power required was proportional to the volume of the transfer and the square of the distance between the endpoints. They had a portal, but only a small fraction of the power that would be necessary to send themselves back across fifty-seven light-years to Earth. The portal there, with its much larger power source, would have to initiate that transaction. But moving things around on the planet wasn’t so much a problem of power as of precision.

It is a common misconception that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. This is not so much a law of physics as it is a natural consequence of other principles. Reality is that whether you look at how atoms fit together to make molecules, or how subatomic particles fit together to make atoms, or how quarks fit together to make subatomic particles, the empty spaces are many orders of magnitude larger than the constituent objects. You really could interleave the particles of one rock into the space occupied by another.

In the next instant, however, mayhem would ensue. The original rock had achieved a delicate balance between the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The sudden introduction of a large number of new particles within the same space would dramatically upend that balance, with unpredictable consequences.

The portal’s solution to this dilemma was to preamble the transfer with a rapidly expanding void that would push out whatever matter currently occupied the destination. This still has significant consequences for anything currently occupying that space, but if mostly air, the implications are trivial.

In the two iterations they had executed the day before, the first return transport had been off by nearly three inches and the second by more than two in the opposite direction. This left an arc-shaped gap on one side of the divot, and packed and mounded soil on the other side where the portal had pushed away whatever was in the space to make room for the incoming sphere.

Swenson and Sakhr seemed to think this would be okay so long as they were working in soft soils, but they couldn’t be sure what would happen if they got into hard rock where pushing it away had potentially seismic consequences. That was why Swenson had sent the drone ahead and marked the spot where he wanted the transponder.

Guerrero set the four-wheeler down. Grass covered the floor of the clearing. As Culpepper saw it up close she realized animals had grazed here, and fairly recently. Memories of growing up on the farm and racing through the cow pasture crept up unbidden from somewhere in her mind. She quickly shoved them back into their closet and barred the door.

“Watch your step. There are landmines everywhere.”

Guerrero had been about to step out of the vehicle, but jerked back and spun around to look at her.

She smiled and pointed through the windshield at the ground in front of the vehicle where the grazers had left behind the byproducts of their craft.

Guerrero shook his head, then climbed out. He grabbed the transponder from the back of the four-wheeler and walked toward the drone. She watched him go for a few steps before he stopped and turned around.

“Are you coming?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. We’ve been through this. We don’t need to do it again.”

We’re wasting time, She thought. You don’t need my help to set up the transponder, and I don’t need your help to start assessing vegetation. But she said, “Right behind you.” She got out of the vehicle, grabbed her pack, and followed after Guerrero.

The transponder sat atop a tripod. Guerrero set it up directly below the hovering drone and adjusted the height to position it five feet off the ground.

He looked at his watch. “We have an hour and twenty minutes until the communication window opens. Where to?”

Culpepper hitched up her pack and started walking toward the treeline. Guerrero followed, and the drone drifted up above the treetops and shadowed them. Swenson had programmed it to track them and monitor their perimeter for potential threats.

The drone didn’t bother her. She knew the threat of aggressive wildlife was real, and having advance warning of potential predators made her feel a lot more comfortable. That was part of why she didn’t feel the need to put up with Guerrero and all his paranoid rules.

For the next hour, they collected samples of everything they could find that might have nutritional value. Culpepper tagged and cataloged them so if anything proved promising they could find more of it. Finally, Guerrero said, “We’d better get what we have back to the staging area. They’ll make radio contact in about five minutes. We need to be ready to transport.”

Culpepper piled the last of what she was looking at onto the sled that Guerrero had fashioned from an animal skin and tree branches. He started dragging it back toward the clearing.

She followed but began lagging further and further behind. When Guerrero got far enough ahead that she didn’t think he could hear her footfalls, she slowed to a stop. When he kept going, she turned and headed off in another direction.

Now we stop wasting time. Meathead can deal with the transport. I’ll get started surveying the next quadrant around the clearing.

Photo by Deglee Degi on Unsplash

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 5: REGULATIONS appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Yes Ma’am. Set it down now.

Alex Guerrero took the four-wheeler off autopilot and nosed down toward the ground. The scrub trees were sparse enough that, in a pinch, he could set down almost anywhere. But, whether Culpepper liked it or not, that wasn’t the way this worked. They were more than four thousand miles from their base camp, in a part of the world they’d never explored, on a planet they’d been on for less than three months, and with no drones to monitor their perimeter.

These stops were necessary, but the riskiest part of the mission. In the air, they had almost unlimited visibility and were out of reach of anything that could do them harm. There were still too many unknowns on the ground, especially now that they’d moved well away from their base camp.

He spotted a small clearing up ahead and angled toward it. Slowing his approach, he made a broad circle around the perimeter to give the four-wheeler’s cameras a good look at their surroundings.

“Horses!” she said.

The computer watched for anything in motion. Culpepper’s job on approach was to assess anything it flagged while Guerrero concentrated on navigation.

He centered up over the clearing but didn’t land. “Where?”

Culpepper pointed past him out the left window. “There!”

He spotted about two dozen animals that looked like Earth horses scattered about among the trees. Most were grazing, but several had turned to look up at them as they hovered twenty feet off the ground.

Big. Fast. We’re outnumbered and on their turf. Guerrero took the controls and started pulling out.

“Set it down. Horses are herbivores, they’re not territorial, and rarely aggressive unless threatened. If there were any real threats here, they wouldn’t be here.”

He looked at her. Makes sense. But then, these are not Earth horses. He looked back over his shoulder at the herd. When the four-wheeler pulled out, most of them had returned to grazing.

Guerrero turned the vehicle around and brought it in for a landing, being careful to take a slow approach from a direction that would minimize the perception of threat to the animals.

He looked out his window. “Let’s take this slow. Give them a chance—”

The sound of Culpepper’s door opening interrupted him. He spun his head around and saw her jump out of the vehicle, sling her pack over her shoulder, and take off at a trot toward the tree line in the direction opposite the herd.

“Where are you going!”

“The ladies’ room,” she shouted. “The little boy’s room is over there.” She pointed back over her shoulder in the direction of the horses. Most of whom, he noted, were now looking directly at him.

Stretch your legs. Sure.

On to Chapter 5

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by James Eades on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 4: RESPITE appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Culpepper stared out the window of the vehicle as they cruised a thousand feet above the crests of the canyons. The view was spectacular. Steep canyon walls striped in varied earth tones with a mostly dry streambed in the bottom. Small patches of several different types of cactus sparsely dotted the landscape. Beautiful, but useless. Nothing in sight that would help them survive. No good reason to land the four-wheeler here.

Their conveyance was somewhat paradoxical. They had begun referring to it as a four-wheeler not because it had four wheels but because it could go anywhere. Almost literally. It looked like someone had taken an extended-cab short-bed pickup truck from the assembly line before the powertrain was added. It had wheel-wells, but no wheels; an engine compartment, but no engine—at least not in the traditional sense. These had been replaced by a power source and propulsion system invented by the same man who had created the transit portal that brought them to this planet. No one here knew how either technology worked. Nor did they understand why the transit portal had stopped working, leaving them stranded fifty-seven light-years from Earth.

This was a bad idea. I told them this was a bad idea. Did they listen to me? Noooo. “You’ll make a good team.” Good team. Right. The botanist and the meathead.

A metallic click broke her reverie. “Are you cleaning that gun again! You just cleaned it yesterday. And the day before that.”

“And the day before that, and the day before that,” Guerrero said. “A craftsman treats his tools with respect. On the subject of which, that tablet will serve you longer if you’ll stop smacking it against the dashboard.”

“I can’t concentrate when you’re doing …” She waved her tablet at his disassembled rifle “ … that.”

“You can always find a distraction when you’re looking for one.”

She shifted in the seat to glare at him. “What, exactly, is that supposed to mean.”

He snapped the barrel of his rifle back into place. “It means you’ve been cooped up in the cab of a pickup truck for three days with nothing to do but stare at snow-covered mountains and desert plains as we sail over them at a thousand feet.”

“I’m trying to review these nutritional analyses.”

Guerrero put his reassembled rifle to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel as he pointed it at the floor between his feet. “Dr. Tornquist has already reviewed that data and didn’t find anything useful. Granted, you’re the expert. But you know she knows what she’s doing. If there were any prospect of anything good, she would’ve flagged it. You’re looking for a distraction. So am I. That’s why I’m cleaning my rifle. Again. It relaxes me—helps me think.”

“Hmph. Don’t strain yourself.” Culpepper shifted back around in her seat, looking again at her tablet. “Stick to your strengths.”

He cycled the action on his rifle. “That’s why I’m here.”

Is there a way for you to not be here?

She was just beginning to get back in the zone when Decker’s voice came over the radio.

“Forager, this is Beachhead. How do you hear?”

Her focus lost yet again, she rapped her tablet against her forehead. Can you not at least talk in complete sentences?

Guerrero responded, “Beachhead, Forager. Loud and clear.”

“How’s your progress?”

He consulted the autopilot display. “We’re a few miles ahead of schedule. Probably had a tailwind last night. Power consumption is right on target. We should arrive at the first objective early tomorrow morning.”

“Roger. The drone should be on location by now. Our communication window with it will open in a few minutes. We won’t have time to do much analysis before our window with you closes in the next hour, but we should have good data for you by this evening. Swenson is recommending you slow your approach to conserve power. There’s no point in rushing to get there before sunrise.”

“Wilco. Over.”

“Beachhead out.”

Culpepper looked out the window again as the terrain zipped by below them.

Another day yet. At least I’ll have something to do once we get there. And then the trip back. Ugh.

Rolling savanna gradually replaced the canyons.

Maybe I can walk back. I wonder how long it would take to walk six thousand miles? Might be worth it.

“Find a place to set down,” she said.

He looked at the terrain map. “Here? Let’s keep going. We’re making good time. We can stop in another hour or so.”

“Now! I need to stretch my legs. Decker said we needed to slow down anyway. It’s not going to make us late to stop here for a few minutes.”

On to Chapter 4

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Quinn Nietfeld on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 3: RETHINK appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Alex Guerrero wouldn’t admit it, but he was cold. Working outside for more than four hours in blizzard conditions had chilled him to the bone.

Not having the right equipment didn’t help. They hadn’t come prepared for this kind of weather. He was wearing a light jacket and thin Kevlar gloves, with a towel wrapped around his head and face, leaving a narrow slit so he could see. But he had endured far worse conditions on other deployments.

And he finished the job. It would never occur to him that there might be another option.

“Close that door!” Culpepper shouted. “What, were you raised in a barn?”

Guerrero closed the door and shook the last of the snow from his jacket and gloves. “Ahhh. Nothing like a light workout and a little fresh air to get your day started on the right foot.”

Steadman, who had already started taking off his own snow-covered outer garments, gave Guerrero a warning glare. Commander Chris Steadman was Alex’s commanding officer and the other Navy SEAL assigned to the team for force protection. Most of the rest, like Culpepper, were scientists.

Teri Culpepper huddled her athletic frame in front of the heater vent, still trying to get warm after her own short effort. The rest of the team sat on chairs or beds arrayed around the perimeter of the room.

The medical lab had become their de facto gathering place. The two crew quarters buildings were partitioned in a way that didn’t facilitate having everyone in the same room. The storage building was packed full of supplies and kept cold to preserve the food they had put away to get them through winter. The science lab was home to too much active research to accommodate interlopers.

“Status?” asked Decker, the mission commander. He was career navy, the last five years as the captain of a reconnaissance submarine.

“I just finished reviewing the latest satellite data from Mabel,” said Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer. “The storm has passed, and we’re covered in snow. In case anyone didn’t already know that. It does look like we shouldn’t have any more big storms, at least for the next few days.”

Culpepper shivered.

Steadman glanced at her and shook his head. “The greenhouse is gone,” he said. “Everything we can find has been collected and stored. Unfortunately, that’s not much. More than half of the wood used for framing is not much better than firewood now. What plastic sheeting didn’t blow away is shredded in pieces too small to be useful. We collected what plants we could and put them in the portal where they can be kept warm. Dr. Culpepper will have to assess the damage there.”

Decker looked at Culpepper. “Doctor?”

Over the course of the three months they had been stranded here together much of the formality in their relationships had fallen aside. Dr. Culpepper was the lone exception. She still insisted on being addressed by her title.

She turned around to face the rest of the team, sitting on the floor in front of the vent—and blocking its warmth from everyone else. “It’s a total loss. I might be able to nurse a few plants back to health, but any hope of them producing useful quantities of food during the next few months is gone. We’re in for a rough winter.”

“Grace?”

Dr. Grace Tornquist, the team’s medical doctor, looked around the room at the others. “It’s not good, but we’ll survive. We have enough in stores that the next few weeks won’t be a problem. There’s still plenty of wild game in the area to provide protein and fat. We’ll run out of carbohydrates, but we should be able to compensate with an increased protein intake. Vitamins are the big problem. General health will begin to deteriorate once our supply of fruits and vegetables runs out. We’ll be more susceptible to illness, less able to recover from injury or exertion.”

“Rationing?” Decker asked.

Tornquist shook her head. “I still have work to do to finish updating the plan, but what I just laid out already assumes optimal stretching of our remaining reserves. I should also point out that this assumes a lot of things we don’t know. We have two months of supplies at minimally acceptable nutritional intake levels. We guess that we still have three months of winter, and then at least a couple of months after that before spring produces enough of the right vegetation to fill those gaps. Dr. Culpepper thinks it could take much longer before some of the fruits we need produce.”

Decker looked around at his team. “Options?”

“I’m continuing to work through the backlog of nutritional analyses,” Culpepper said. “There’s nothing left out there that we’d normally think of as food, but we might get lucky. It’s a longshot.”

Guerrero looked around the room. Eight people huddled in a box trying to keep out the cold. This wasn’t the plan. His job was to keep everyone safe, to make sure they all made it home alive. They had been ten; now they were eight. That was on him. This was on him. Setting all the positive attitude aside, not everyone would survive the winter ahead if they stayed on this path. There had to be another way.

He looked at Culpepper. “What about the southern hemisphere?”

On to Chapter 3

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 2: RESET appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Mabel watched as the alien sun rose above the horizon of the planet below. Morning light reflected from dense clouds as a winter storm moved slowly over the continent. It was difficult to see where the tempest ended as white clouds gave way to white snowpack.

The people below would have said the view was breathtaking. For Mabel, it was just a job—a job she’d been doing twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day for more than four months.

She switched to infrared wavelengths where she could more easily distinguish the clouds. The storm had moved beyond their encampment. They would want to see this.

An incoming message interrupted her task for a tiny fraction of a second. As she acknowledged the request, she resumed surveying the planet’s surface and began uploading the last eight hours of recorded data.

It never occurred to Mabel to wonder what it was like for the people below. How would it feel to wake up with two feet of snow covering your camp? To hear blizzard-force winds howling in the darkness the night before? To watch as structures and equipment critical to your survival were destroyed by the gale? To be eight people marooned on an alien world with no way to get home and no way of knowing when—or even if—home would be coming back for you?

How would it feel to be human?

Mabel would never know. Mabel would never wonder.

On to Chapter 2

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Adem Gül on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 1: DAWN appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

“All I wanted was to do my job. I’m good at my job. Why can’t people see that I don’t need help?”
— Dr. Teresa “Teri” Culpepper

The decisions we make define our lives. Uphill or downhill? Right or left? Right or wrong?

One decision we face frequently is whether to go it alone or to join up with a team.

There seems to be something in our nature that biases us toward the solo path. We like to read stories or watch movies about the hero who stands alone against evil, prevailing against the odds. Rambo. Kwai Chang Caine. John McClane. Bruce Wayne. The Lone Ranger. Where the hero has colleagues, they’re mostly there to provide contrast or comic relief—a plot device to make the hero look good or to help the writer explain things to the audience.

We fancy these stories because we admire the go-it-alone model. And it works—at least in these fictional universes. Unfortunately, we don’t get to live life there. In this reality, where we actually live, the rules are different. As John C. Maxwell says in The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, “Nothing of significance was ever achieved by an individual acting alone.” His first “indisputable” law, the law of significance, says that “One is too small a number to achieve greatness.” If you take time to look at the backstory of any hero of the real world, you’ll find they had a team behind and around them.

So why do we prefer the solo path? If I go my own way, I don’t have to worry about anyone else. I don’t have to explain my thinking or try to convince anyone that I’m right. I don’t have to carry their water. I don’t have to listen to them whine. I don’t have to compromise. I don’t have to share the credit for my eventual success. And there will be no witnesses to my failures.

And, when I get there, no one with whom to share my celebration. Oh, sure, I’ll share, but no one else will care enough to listen or rejoice with me. They’re all part of a community, and just like I didn’t need them, they’ve learned to get by without me.

While I do think there is something in our nature that biases us toward the solo path, I also think we were made for community. We yearn for people who will rejoice in our successes. And we treasure those who come alongside us in our failures.

What is a community? A community is a group of people united by a common interest. Teamwork is more than community, and community is more than teamwork, but you can’t have a successful team without community, and you can’t have a successful community without teamwork.

Teamwork is how a community organizes and executes to protect the interest that unites them, and this, I think, was the crux of Culpepper’s problem in Forager: She never came to grips with the common interest of the community in which she found herself. She didn’t sign up to do life with this group of people; she sought to be the first botanist to study plant life on another planet. The rest were strangers with whom she neither had nor desired any kind of relationship. Worse, they were competitors for limited resources that she needed to enable her to execute her role.

Maxwell’s second law of teamwork—what he calls the law of the big picture—says “the goal is more important than the role.” After their supply line from Earth was lost, the big picture goal—in other words, their common interest—became survival. To Culpepper, that was someone else’s problem. Her role was botany, and everyone else needed to get out of her way and let her get it done. She didn’t sign up for a team, and she had no desire to join any community. It wasn’t until the single-minded pursuit of her profession nearly got her—and Guerrero—killed that she came to recognize a shared interest in getting through this alive.

So if it’s all about the team and collective success, does that mean that individualism and heroic character are outmoded? Not at all. Maxwell’s third law of teamwork—the law of the niche—says “all players have a place where they add the most value.” Guerrero clearly understands where he adds the most value. As does Culpepper. They each have a role to play, and each is uniquely gifted for their role. The team succeeds, and the community thrives, when every individual executes their respective role—subject to The Law of the Big Picture.

Forager

Alex Guerrero and Teri Culpepper have nothing in common.

He’s an elite warrior, trained to be a leader in Earth’s premier fighting force.

She’s an academic, a professor of botanical sciences, struggling to keep enough grants coming in to support her meager research.

But now a catastrophe has forced them together, the lives of eight people hanging on the success of their daring mission into unexplored territory on an unknown planet. Can they work together to find the secret to survival on this alien world, or will their rivalry doom the entire expedition?

More info →

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The post On Teamwork appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Life is fatal. Everything that lives, dies. We knew when we came to this planet we were risking death. But even if we hadn’t come, all of us would still have died. Eventually. Each of us judged that it was a risk worth taking for the hope of what we might find when we got here.

— Chief Petty Officer Alejandro “Alex” Guerrero — Forager

Everything that lives, dies. Most of us spend our lives studiously ignoring this reality. A few of us are obsessed with it. Alex Guerrero has made peace with this verity, and therein lies the foundation of his uncommon courage.

Merriam-Webster defines courage as “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.” I think “danger” and “difficulty” are superfluous in that characterization. Danger and difficulty inspire fear. Courage—and cowardice—are about how we respond to that fear.

Do you anticipate death? Most of us don’t. There is something in our nature that expects eternity. How many people do you know, or even know of, who have lived more than 150 years? Everyone dies, eventually, and yet most of us don’t spend our lives consumed with the prospect. Quite the opposite, we live each day as though we’ll live forever. Because we expect it. (I realize some who are reading this are in the other camp. Please keep reading—there’s hope here for you too.)

But there’s a conflict. Most of us have known people who are older than eighty or ninety. We see the trend in the quality of life as age increases. And, frankly, most of us aren’t comfortable with the idea of living even to that age. How do we reconcile these: our desire—even expectation—to live forever, and our antipathy toward getting old?

To answer that question, we first have to ask more foundational questions: How did I come to exist? How did life itself come to be? How did the universe originate? Why am I here?

These are, by definition, philosophical questions. Any system of philosophy is ultimately an effort to answer these questions. That is true of Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, Scientific Naturalism, Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, Darwinism, or any other philosophy.

But which system of thought has the right answers? Will any of them do?

The short answer is no. If you’d like a more comprehensive treatment of that topic, and why Christianity is the most reasonable answer, I highly recommend I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll focus on what I believe is the most rational philosophy.

Alex Guerrero found his answers in Christianity. It teaches that there is a being, a person, who is beyond nature. He is not nature; he is not a part of nature. He is outside of nature. Nature is a thing he created—a thing he created out of nothing. He made the whole of the universe: galaxies, stars, planets, continents, oceans, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, and whatever quarks are made of. And he created life. Plants and animals, you and me.

So what does Christianity tell us about this expectation of eternity and the antithetical antipathy toward growing old?

The Christian Bible tells us that God created us for a reason. That we are, in fact, the pinnacle of all that he created. The rest of it—plants and planets, atoms and animals, quarks and quasars—he created solely because he wanted to create us, and he knew we would need all those things.

Why did he create us? We may never fully comprehend the answer to that question, but at least in part, he wanted to be able to express his love, and that required the existence of someone besides himself. And he wanted people who could reflect that love—to each other and him.

The Bible tells us we are unique in all creation in that we are “created in the image of God.” That word “image” doesn’t mean that we’re copies of God, but that we have some limited characteristics that are reflections of God—much as a photograph is an image of reality, but does not itself become the reality. The picture is real, but not the same reality it represents.

So in what way, or ways, are we like God? We’re not omnipotent, or omniscient, or omnipresent. What characteristics of humans are reflections of God?

I don’t know that anyone can offer an exhaustive or authoritative list, but there are at least a few things we can draw from the Bible. One is that he created us to be eternal. Not in the same way that God is eternal. He is self-existent while our existence will always be rooted in him, and he exists outside of time while we had a beginning and will forever be constrained by the progress of time. But for the rest of time, we will exist. This is why eternity is in our hearts. We expect it because he created us for it. (At this point some of you are saying, “Wait a minute. We just agreed that everyone dies.” Stay with me. I’m getting there.)

But there’s also another way in which we reflect the character of God, and it is equally relevant to our current predicament. He gave us free will, the freedom to make our own choices. But it is also so much more than that. We are not automatons constrained by algorithms written by programmers—or even by our education or environment.

We have the capacity to consider a thing and to want it—and to choose to act to acquire it. I’m not talking about greed or envy. Both find their root in free will, but so do generosity and sacrifice. Love and hate are both exhibits of the exercise of free will.

Love would have no meaning without free will. If my wife makes me a cup of coffee because she’s been programmed to make coffee, that isn’t love. To quote the inimitable Mr. Spock, “One does not thank logic.”

Hate would have no meaning without free will. The wolf does not kill out of hate. It acts out of hunger, and an instinct that tells it what to eat when it gets hungry. Choosing not to kill is not really an option for the wolf.

God gave us free will so we could know what love is. So we could recognize it when he demonstrates it to us. And so we could express love—to each other and him.

But that gift comes at a price. Giving us the freedom to choose love meant also giving us the freedom to choose hate. And when we chose hate we chose to separate ourselves from God because love is intrinsic to who God is. In him there is no hate, and he cannot be a party to it.

The Bible describes a tree in the Garden of Eden called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Adam was instructed by God to not eat from this tree. But Adam and Eve exercised their God-given free will to reject God’s instruction and eat of its fruit. In so doing, they learned the difference between good and evil—between living life according to God’s plan and rejecting his will to go their own way.

The consequence of this choice, as God had warned them beforehand, was death. That word death means separation. In contemporary use, we recognize it as separation of the spirit from the body. We were created to walk in eternity in the presence and fellowship of God in the garden. Now that we had learned we could choose to go our own way, we had to learn what it looks like to be separated from God—the source of life and love.

This would not be a “fall on the ground and feed the vultures” death. It would be to experience the struggle of living life apart from God. Instead of walking in a garden overflowing with life and beauty, we would toil in the dirt to fight for sustenance. And, instead of eternal youth and vitality, we would experience the slow-motion decay of our bodies as the pinnacle of creation coasted downhill in isolation from its creator. Thus we would “know” death, and come to understand the consequence of choosing to go our own way.

But this is not the end of the story. God doesn’t write tragedies. From the very beginning of his story, he had a plan. When he gave us free will, he knew we would eventually make the wrong choice. If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t be free will. But he created us for eternity and loves us too much to leave us to live it out in this fallen state.

This is the good news—the “gospel” of Jesus Christ. God became one of us. He was born into the world to a virgin mother. He was tempted in every way as we are tempted and yet lived a sinless life. Then, despite having no sin in him, allowed himself to be executed as a criminal as a sacrifice to pay the price for our sin. He died. He was buried. And three days later he rose from the dead, a fact witnessed and attested by a large number of people.

His resurrection demonstrated two things: First, that he had power over sin and death. And second, that we could rely on his promise that we too would be resurrected from death to a new life—with an imperishable body—restored into fellowship with God for the rest of eternity. All he asks is that we admit that it was our sin that separated us and that he did for us what we could never do for ourselves. Salvation is a free gift given by God not because we earned it, but because he loves us.

The day will come when we will all be raised from the dead to live a new life that will last for eternity. Those who have recognized their sin and who put their trust in Jesus to restore them into a relationship with God will spend that eternity in a restored universe, reunited with the God who created them.

Those who haven’t put their faith in Jesus will also be resurrected, but they will also be granted the freedom they’ve demanded—to live in eternity apart from their creator-God. This, the Bible calls hell.

The choice of where you will spend eternity is up to you. Choose wisely.

Alex chose to put his faith in Jesus. That explains why he doesn’t fear death—he knows death isn’t fatal—but it still doesn’t illuminate why he chooses to live life the way he does—why he regularly elects to sacrifice his own personal interest for the interests of others. Our most common fears are not about dying but about missing out.

We want things. Food, shelter, clothing. Money, power, sex. Things are not evil. Things are not good. Things are things. Good and evil are about the choices people make. (Which brings us back to free will.)

God created us to need certain things, particularly food, shelter, and clothing. He also created us to want things that go beyond what we need. That isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s what motivates us to be productive.

He commanded us to “be fruitful and multiply.”* In the same verse he said, “fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth." (Genesis 1:28, CSB)

As Swenson, the engineer, observed in Two, “[T]hat’s pretty much what we humans do. Tame the earth. Work the garden. If they’re not doing those things, it’s hard to argue they’re an analogue to human.” This is another way we’re like God: the Creator created us to be creative. It is our needs and our wants that drive us to fulfill this mandate.

Fear enters the picture when our free will faces a choice where we have reason to believe our needs or wants might not be met. Sometimes fear is a good thing; it pushes us away from bad options. Fear of damaging the concrete discourages me from jumping off the roof. But sometimes fear is a bad thing, pushing me away from doing right because I perceive relative benefit from doing wrong. (”Relative benefit” meaning either that I get something by doing the one thing or that I don’t lose something by doing the other.)

What does the Bible tell us about this fear? There is a beautiful passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is talking to his disciples:

Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life-span by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:25-34, CSB)

Elsewhere God says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you … plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’" (Jeremiah 29:11, CSB) God knows you need things. He promises that if you put your faith in him, he’ll meet those needs. Guerrero seeks first God’s kingdom (his plan for how things should work in the world) and God’s righteousness (his definition of what is right), and he trusts God to take care of the rest.

Footnotes:

*Looking carefully at the context of this scripture, I don’t think he intended it literally. Why command us to multiply without also insisting on addition, subtraction, and long division? I don’t think you need a passing grade in differential calculus to get into heaven. The context indicates instead that he meant for us to reproduce—to have children and families—so that as we learned what it was to have children—and to have a father—we would better understand how he regards us—and how we should regard him.

Forager

Alex Guerrero and Teri Culpepper have nothing in common.

He’s an elite warrior, trained to be a leader in Earth’s premier fighting force.

She’s an academic, a professor of botanical sciences, struggling to keep enough grants coming in to support her meager research.

But now a catastrophe has forced them together, the lives of eight people hanging on the success of their daring mission into unexplored territory on an unknown planet. Can they work together to find the secret to survival on this alien world, or will their rivalry doom the entire expedition?

More info →

Buy This Book Online

The post On Courage appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

The overloaded “right” creates one of the great ambiguities in the English language.
Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this:

John: You said to turn left up here?
Jane: Right.
[John approaches the intersection, looks both ways, proceeds to turn right.]
Jane: [irritated] Why did you turn right! I said to turn left.
John: [exasperated] No, I asked if you wanted to turn left; you corrected me and said you wanted to turn right.
Jane: [insolent] No, I told you that you were right, we needed to turn left. I never said anything about turning right.

Software developers call this an “overload”; a symbol or operator is re-used for a different function. Used correctly, it is a powerful feature that enables the creation of elegant and maintainable software. Used incorrectly, it can be a nightmare. The most important rule when overloading an operator is that the functionality must remain consistent with the original meaning.

The problem here is that we’ve overloaded a word that indicates direction to also connote a moral judgment. This should never have been allowed to happen to the language. Direction, as a general principle, has no moral component. (In a specific context there may, in fact, be a correct direction and an incorrect direction. But as a general principle, this cannot be said.)

The real tragedy is that this wasn’t necessary. There are plenty of good words already available to assert that something is right correct.

Please use them. Let’s all agree to stop using “right” as an antonym for “wrong”. At least in contexts where it could be confused with direction.

Now, I know some of you have gotten ahead of me and are thinking to yourselves, “This is not the only place we’ve overloaded the word ‘right’ that clouds meaning.” And you would be correct.

We’ve also overloaded the meaning of “right” (and “left”) to connote political inclination. This started out innocently enough; the political “right-wing” was the party that was seated on the right-hand side of the congressional assembly, and the “left-wing” was the party that was seated on the left-hand side of the room. (This actually started in the late 1700s in France, but it’s also true of our congress here in the US.)

Simple enough. And part of me wants to leave it there, because given the status quo, my own personal political predilection has the benefit of being associated with the superior moral connotation.

But I think it’s unfortunate in this regard: it short-circuits debate. We don’t feel the need to defend our positions (or even really know why we believe what we believe). We’re “right”, after all. But those who don’t think like us aren’t persuaded to join our cause. They may not know what they believe either, but they’re smart enough to see that our sole defense is built on an accident of semantics.

So what are “right” and “left” in political terms? In this country, and at this point in history, “right” is generally associated with “conservative”, and “left” with “liberal” (or “progressive”, or “socialist”—the name is less important than the substantive beliefs).

Conservatives are generally in favor of remaining true to (conserving) the principles on which our country was founded. In general, these are the principles of individual freedom and limited government. The reason we chose to elevate these principles above other ideas that might be considered was derived from our belief that every individual human being is equally the pinnacle of God’s creation. (If you doubt that assertion, reread the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.)

Liberals are generally in favor of more government control and intervention. (If you disagree with this characterization, point to a liberal policy that contradicts it.) They believe this is the best path to equality.

Both sides want equality, but they disagree regarding what constitutes equality and how to achieve it. Liberals want equal outcomes, and see collectivism and government action as the most realistic path. Conservatives want equal opportunity. They see a role for government in ensuring a level playing field, but this role is limited to creating an environment where every individual has the freedom to play the game in whatever way best suits his or her unique talents and passions.

Let me repeat what I said earlier: Every. Individual. Human. Being. Is the pinnacle of God’s creation. I recognize that there’s a logical incongruity in that statement, but I challenge you to find a scripture that says God doesn’t see it that way. Mankind is the pinnacle of his creation, the only thing he created in his own image. And he didn’t just create Adam and Eve; he created each one of us individually. David says, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13b NIV)” He created each of us uniquely—we’re not all carbon copies of the same template. He considers each of us to be his children (in one sense, but not another—a topic for another time) and longs for us all to experience a restored relationship with him.

This nation was founded on these principles, and it was the first time in recorded history where a nation chose to elevate individual freedom above government control. When we talk about American exceptionalism, this is what we’re talking about. Not that Americans are better than everyone else, but that unfettered individual freedom would lead to a superior outcome for everyone in society.

It worked. And while it’s true that we’ve fallen far from this ideal, it is also true that even still people everywhere want to leave where they are to come here because of the prosperity that results from these principles.

What do you believe? Can you articulate why?

The post Right or Left? appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

(Okay, so there’s only one book so far. Two, and it’s upcoming sequel, One, will set the stage for both series. God-willing, of course.)

The fundamental speculation behind these stories is that the good guys win more often than the bad guys. Conflict is a fundamental component of good stories, and in the best stories, good overcomes evil. But much of modern speculative fiction starts from the presumption that evil has overwhelmingly held sway; humanity is destined for depravity. Save for the singular hero who dares to stand up against it.

But what if humanity is really made up mostly of people like you and me? People who know the difference between right and wrong, and have the will to stand up for what we believe. Would that eliminate conflict (the stuff of which good stories are made)? No, because there will always be people who are disconnected from our standard of what is right. Evil is real, and will always be with us (at least on this side of eternity).

But what that reality might do is lead to a more positive future for humanity. A future we can look forward to. A future where our children can reach for the stars. A future where life isn’t about survival, but about significance.

Are you looking for a refreshing vision of what the future can be if we’re willing to take a stand in the here and now for what we know is right?

Get your copy of Two today at Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com.

The post Why I Write appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

If we could get there—if a door were suddenly opened and we could travel the stars—what would we find?

Maybe you’ve seen some of these recent headlines:

“Aliens likely to be ‘electronic entities’ which have overthrown their creators.“ This British cosmologist believes that any aliens who visit us will be more or less just like us, but more advanced. Which, to him, means they’ll already have been overthrown by the machines they created.

“Astronaut who walked on the moon: ‘why I know aliens haven’t visited Earth.'” This astronaut believes that if aliens exist, they’re all really good people. If they’d visited us, they would’ve introduced themselves and offered to help us solve all our problems.

“Stephen Hawking wants to find aliens before they find us.” Dr. Hawking compares the idea of us contacting aliens to Native Americans welcoming Columbus. “That didn’t turn out so well,” he says.

A NASA study from 2012 estimates that within our galaxy there are 100 billion planets, and that 10 billion of those are similar in size to Earth. The study further estimates that there may be 1,500 planets (150 Earth-sized) within fifty light-years of Earth.

Multiplied by the estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, there may be 2×10²¹ (that’s a 2 followed by 21 zeros, or two thousand billion billion) Earth-sized planets in the universe. Some people argue that with that many planets, it’s just simple statistics that there must be other planets with life on them.

But those people haven’t finished doing the math. Yes, there may be a lot of planets, providing a lot of opportunity for life. But what does it take for life to begin spontaneously? This excellent documentary, using a very generous set of assumptions, estimates the probability of one simple protein self-organizing is one in 10¹⁶⁴ (that’s a 1 with 164 zeros after it; 22:20 mark in the video). Given 10⁵⁸ seconds in the 4.6 billion year history of the planet Earth, the odds against this single protein ever having invented itself are one in 10¹⁰⁶. Of course, we do have 2×10²¹ laboratories cross which to duplicate the experiment, but that sill means the chances of life creating itself once across the entire universe is (considerably less than) one chance in 5×10⁸⁴ (that’s a 5 followed by 84 zeros). That’s for one single, simple protein. The simplest cells require more than 300 unique proteins. And they all have to come together at the same place, at the same time, inside some kind of cell wall, and in the presence of a bunch of other unique complex molecules.

It didn’t happen. Not twice. Not even once.

And yet, here we are. So if life didn’t create itself spontaneously, how did we get here?

A lot of different ideas have been proposed. It’s important to recognize that unless we figure out how to travel backward in time, none of those ideas can ever be proven. No one was there to witness the first life. Even if we could create life out of nothing in a laboratory (a big if), we couldn’t prove that life on Earth originated by the same mechanism. And in fact, we would only be proving that intelligent design is a viable explanation. (We didn’t observe it creating itself. In this hypothetical scenario, we went to great lengths to create the circumstances by which it came to be. We created it. And we’re intelligent, right?).

So believing any theory about the origin of life on Earth requires faith—believing something you can’t see and can’t prove.

Which requires less faith: That we hit the lottery and are that one chance in 5×10⁸⁴? Or that God exists and created us? (Before you choose against God, realize that this argument based on the improbability of self-organizing life is but one of a long list of evidences of design in the universe.)

So if God created life on Earth, and that same God created the entire universe, could there be other life out there? If there were, what might it look like?

I’ll share some of my thoughts in a future post (as well as my upcoming science fiction novel, Two). But for now, what do you think?

The post What’s It Like Out There? appeared first on Steve Swaringen.