Short Story: Leap of Faith

[Mystikan]

Here is my gift - a short story I wrote about a year ago, when I was thinking of possible ways of overcoming greed and avarice in the human race. This is one possible answer, the story of a man who creates a clever psychological filter for sorting the altruistic from the avaricious. Some will love it, others will think it ludicrous; but its plausibility isn't the issue. What it tells us about human greed and distrust is.

Leap Of Faith
by Mystikan

1. Choice

-From the journals of Christopher Connelly
14th September 2025 AD

I knew Calum McKinley as a kid; we went to the same school together and we were in the same class for three years running. Before our teens, we used to ride our bikes down the creek and look for tadpoles. Then he discovered computers, while I discovered computer games, and little suspected there was a world of difference between the two. And the main part of that distinction is, as the old gardener put it, the difference between raking in and forking out.

Now a lot of people claim they know Calum McKinley personally, but nearly all of them are just climbers and crawlers, because he's now the world's greatest hero - or villain, depending on your outlook on life. He is also, needless to say, now the world's richest hero or villain...

Sure, you may say I'm just another name-dropper, but behind that attitude lies one of the problems with the world that McKinley was so concerned about. I also knew that besides Mike and Tommo and myself, he had no friends, and very much preferred it that way, while we were kids. Later, when he started getting into computers, he started associating with a different group of friends. They were the sort of people who used to speak of CPUs and binary code, and were not in the least interested in how you were supposed to get past that damn fireball-throwing beast in Level Two…

So during our teenage years, we drifted apart. He got a job with Alltech Communications, the Internet service provider in our town, and started making big money and realising his life's ambitions. I went on the dole, and spent my days pumping government money into arcade game corporations' coffers. C'est la vie.

Now the only reason I'm revealing all this is so that the basis on which I tell this tale is clearly understood. I knew Calum McKinley as a kid, and was a good friend of his for a long time. If you choose not to believe me on this matter, that's your own affair...

One thing that always bothered McKinley was lies. He was fond of saying that because people lied, people distrusted one another and that was what made the world a bad place. He would describe, at length, his vision for a future in which people could trust one another, nobody needed to lie, and all could be friends. We all said he was too idealistic, to which he would reply that if it wasn't for idealists nothing would ever get done. He was big on trust and truth, which in a way bothered many people because he was honest to the point of brutal tactlessness. Yet he was right; because he never lied to me, I trusted him implicitly. I still do - sort of, but I'll get to that later.

For those who have been resident in Outer Mongolia and suchlike places for the last twenty years, Calum McKinley is the president and founder of Genatia Corporation. This much praised and maligned organisation makes billions of dollars every year, by making people disappear. (That's even been one of their slogans in their advertising campaigns. Trust McKinley to tell it like it is!) And no government on Earth can do a damn thing, because his corporation's method of making people disappear has all the scientists stumped.

The 'scam' is simple; on the strength of their advertising blurb, you sign over all your worldly wealth and assets to the corporation. That means everything you own; money, shares, land, stocks, bonds, possessions, clothes, even heirlooms and keepsakes. You hand over everything. Then they take you and up to four friends to Genatia, their little private island in the Pacific. You then go aboard a space liner while your friends wave the hanky and see you off safely. The spaceliner, looking like an outsized Concorde, is then launched into space along a horizontal hypersonic maglev track set tangential to the Earth's surface.

According to American military and scientific bodies, these spacecraft move into high orbit, then dock with the closely guarded and otherwise unapproachable Genatia Orbital Complex. In a telescope, this looks like a huge, slowly rotating cylinder with a larger flattened spheroid stuck on one end. The ships disappear into an iris aperture in the free end of this spheroid, never to be seen again. Thus the Genatia Corporation manages to dispose of some hundred and fifty thousand people, and around two hundred spaceliners, every year.

Gravitic and motion analyses conducted of the station's orbit reveal that the orbital mass of the station plus the mass of a just-docked ship remains constant for around one minute after the iris closes. Then the orbital mass instantaneously decreases by exactly that of the ship, and the station orbits as before. The station is impervious to all forms of internal scanning; infrared, X-ray, mass correlation and even meson pulses have proven ineffective. Long-range photos taken when the aperture is open reveal only inky blackness inside, even when laser light is directed into it. Psionics has also been tried by various groups, also with no certain success. But then, has it ever?

Space shuttles and other countries' and corporations' spacecraft that approach the station are warned off, and if they disregard the warnings they simply - vanish, to reappear with a colossal flash out in the desert nearest its country of origin. The flash usually destroys anything in the vicinity, though the spacecraft remains unharmed, which explains the remote locations.

When the United States protested this behaviour, and began giving the corporation trouble, McKinley simply closed down the whole American division, putting many thousands of people out of work and causing several sections of the American public to raise a vociferous outcry. Naturally, the US government completely disregarded the opinions of these people and continued harassing the corporation overseas. Then McKinley and his cohorts managed to gain an audience with the President of the US and his Joint Chiefs of Staff. The details of this meeting were never made public, but it is certain that after it had finished, the US quietly ceased any and all harassment of Genatia Corporation and even allowed it to re-establish its American operations. After facing down America, no other country even whimpered about McKinley's mysterious space station. What many others and I found unbelievable, was that such a new and untested corporation had such economic and political muscle that it could face down America! To simply shut down one’s operations in the richest and most powerful country on this planet and then coerce the most powerful man in the world surely bespoke some very momentous discoveries – not to mention raised the question of where else McKinley was getting his money from…

To the uninitiated, such behaviour on the part of such a domineering government in defence of a corporation such as Genatia Corp, might seem a tad strange, until you consider exactly what they claim to be doing.

Which brings me back to Calum McKinley and his vision of a brave new world for mankind, his belief in the power of trust and truth. If he is now a liar, and he is simply vaporising people in a huge nuclear reactor as his opponents say, that represents a complete undoing of every fibre of his being. I know this, because I knew McKinley as a kid.

His rise to fame was as unlikely as it was meteoric; in fact, it resembled a child's comic-book fantasy. At first, he made good money in computers, but his fascination with science soon led him in other paths. For a long time, he considered it merely an interesting, albeit expensive, hobby. Then McKinley and a small clique of his technically minded contemporaries (so the story runs) came up with a means of generating a seemingly infinite amount of energy by harnessing the quantum interstices of spacetime in a process simulating a miniature Big Bang. Or something like that. How it happened has been kept the greatest secret; so revolutionary a discovery as that, would wreak havoc in the wrong hands. Yet like most scientists, McKinley was so sure that his were the right hands...

At first, nobody believed this little bunch of science-crazed postgrads and their approaches to various scientific bodies for grants to pursue their research were met with scorn and derision. Yet such was McKinley's success in his chosen field of networks and business systems, that he soon had no need of grants, and began the research out of his own pocket to prove his theory.

His first mass-market product earned him both a bank account the size of some national GDPs, as well as the life-long enmity of oil- and battery-company executives. He released a cell the size of a watch battery that could power every appliance in a domestic household for a year. It might have been longer, even forever, but that would have made the mass of the thing prohibitive. As it was, the prototype weighed in at a hundred kilograms.

Analysis of this wonder widget revealed only that it consisted of a carbon-iron casing in which was embedded a submicroscopic speck of nonatomic neutronium, or pure neutron mass, which explained why the thing weighed so much. How this was made was anybody's guess, but the boffins soon began expostulating quantum theories concerning spacetime and wormholes; they also explained how the energy supply was not actually infinite - the minute quantity of neutronium 'evaporated' after a year and had to be replaced. But none of them were ever able to make one, and an explosion of supernuclear magnitude, which blew out a twenty-kilometre crater deep in the Australian outback, presently discouraged any further attempts. This inevitably resulted in a worldwide ban on McKinley's battery, whipped up by a scare campaign, funded by governments and corporations alike, involving images of nice country towns being nuked to plasma by some housewife's washing machine. Ownership of them was outlawed in almost every country, with heavy penalties for non-compliance, and consequently the micro marvel disappeared from homes and store shelves to the collective groans of a disgruntled public. Yet, not before McKinley and Co. wound up a 13-digit balance in the Swiss banking computers.

After this, McKinley and his clique, rich beyond their wildest nightmares, set up their own space program. They kept everything under tight wraps, and no other government or corporation could learn a thing about their operations. They drove the Pentagon demented at the fact that a private enterprise could wield more power than every government on Earth, particularly that of the US, which, as mentioned, made frequent protestations and even attempted military interference. McKinley pointed out that as his project was self-funded and it was his device he could use it as he saw fit. And use it he did, not as a weapon, but as a means of inexplicable disappearance. They set themselves up on an isolated Pacific island, which they named Genatia - the land of new beginnings. Anybody who landed on the island - or anchored a ship off it - simply passed out and awoke back in their home country, while spy satellites and reconnaissance planes only detected beach, jungle and millions and millions of seabirds.

For a long time, they kept the world at bay; but the mass media drew the world's attention to the space station they were constructing, and many a backyard astronomer's attention strayed to the bright star gradually waxing low in the southwest (at least as seen from the United States; it maintained a geostationary orbit 35,880 kilometres directly above the island. It shone high in the eastern skies of Australia and East Asia, but from Africa, the Middle East and Europe it was always below the horizon.). The world papers and news channels regularly published long-distance shots of the expanding cylinder and of the two hundred kilometre-long launch track jutting eastward from the island. This last structure had appalled the structural engineers of the day; the huge embankment upon which it was built simply grew, over the space of about three days, and during its construction the sea had boiled and frothed in its track most considerably. By way of explanation, Genatia Corporation announced that they had perfected a self-replicating construction robot – but they were understandably reluctant to release it on the open market, considering the trouble they’d had over McKinley’s power cells… This had aroused the ire of many environmental groups; but they, like the military they so often opposed, were denied approach. One middle-eastern nation, which shall remain nameless, even launched a nuclear missile at Genatia, announcing that they would send the world-destroying devil-worshipper back to the fires of hell. Of course, the missile simply disappeared without trace, and finally rumours of wormholes and teleports became rife.

Then the Genatia Corporation emerged with a blaze of publicity overshadowing even the release of the home computer a generation earlier. This, they announced, was the most momentous occasion in all human history, this was what everyone for millennia had hoped and dreamed for.

Per aspera ad astra. We have reached the stars.

So McKinley had discovered the secret of interstellar travel, or so it seemed. A torrent of press releases from the corporation's headquarters filled all the global papers for months, explaining how they had perfected wormhole technology and had sent probes to all the nearby stars. At Tau Ceti they had discovered three planets, one of which was earthlike, and rich with life. In a seeming fit of whimsy, they named the new planet Neoterra, and described it as a veritable Eden. At first, McKinley and his cohorts, driven by idealism, began making their discoveries public, although they kept the actual secret of generating what they called a 'transduct gate' very sedulously. But they released a stream of photos from the probes, and a number of rock, water and gas samples were duly despatched to various scientific bodies for analysis. They refused to supply samples of lifeforms from Neoterra, however, stating that the alien forms could have a detrimental effect on Earth's life.

Then the trouble started. At first, the world had simply reeled in shock, at the possibility that such a profound discovery had actually occurred. Then the US government, with its well known penchant for discrediting what it could not control, announced that the NASA scientists had found the photos to be faked, and that the samples were of terrestrial origin. More likely they had had their grants threatened to say so, but anyone who suggested this was soon dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. McKinley was publicly derided as a fraud and a trickster, which must have gnawed at him like a worm in an apple, he who was so obsessed with truth and trust...

Seeing this, McKinley had promptly changed his tack from purely scientific to public appeal. To many, his new approach must have looked like economic and political suicide, because he refused to answer his detractors. Instead, he altered his publicity campaigns, based around the individual's freedom of choice and belief in mankind, and proposed to set up a colony on the new world, open to any who were willing to take the chance.

The resulting TV ads were of the most nauseating corporate sugar-and-spice as ever any telecommunications company aired. One particularly heinous example of the advertiser's art featured a flying rotating pan shot of a stereotypical happy family, watching the sun rise from a spectacular mountaintop to the accompaniment of soul-swelling music. Amid flashes of people at play in a peaceful and harmonious world, a gradually increasing chorus sang a Utopian jingle in a distinctly Rod Stewart guitar-and-synthesiser style:


“There is a new day dawning for the children of the world
A place of peace and justice, with hopes and dreams unfurl'd;
For here, for you, we have the key to mankind's oldest dream,
To reach the stars together, build a new world as a team.
Though this our noble quest is never for the faint of heart,
Though we forsake our mother Earth, forever to depart,
Come with us on our journey, if indeed you think it safe,
To trust the spirit of mankind, and make a leap of faith…
…Make a leap of faith…”


That last line was delivered in an oh-so-poignant soft tenor, echoing after the chorus. As the jingle faded, the now-familiar blue triple-triangle insignia of Genatia Corporation swept in at the bottom of the bucolic scenes, while the family watched a spaceliner soar gracefully into the sunrise from offscreen. The sun seemed to flare out and fill the screen with white. Finally came the fade-to-black and a man's deep rich voice announced, “If you seek a new life in a bold new adventure and want to know more, call this toll-free number now or visit our website at w-w-w, genatia dot com”.

This, then, was McKinley's masterstroke. The media was so full of stultifying advertising of this nature that only the most optimistic, idealistic naïfs gave it any credence whatsoever. Following McKinley’s quiet meeting with the US President and his people, there were surprising numbers of them, and still are. Even now, some hundred and fifty thousands of people flock to the island every year, turning over their worldly wealth to disappear forever into Genatia Corporation’s mysterious “disposal unit”.

The corporation does not discriminate in any way; if you own nothing but the shirt on your back, they will take it and let you make the trip. Of course, if you are well off, they still take everything you own. As a result, there are very few rich people who choose to embark on this venture, since they have that much more to lose. If McKinley’s space station does indeed lead to an off-world paradise, it certainly makes a dramatic impression of the eye of a needle…

For my part, I have yet to make the trip, if indeed I ever do. My wife, Chantal, is strongly opposed to the idea; she subscribes to the theories currently being put about concerning the tremendous bursts of energy from around the station, recently recorded by mass-energy spectrometry. Scientists at JPL have published readings, which indicate that at the moment the docked ship’s mass disappears, a powerful magnetic field forms around the station’s sphere, containing a burst of energy equivalent to a twenty thousand megaton fusion blast. That’s certainly enough to completely vapourise a ship without trace, a theory subscribed to by scientists and conspiracy theorists alike. Time and again Chantal and I have argued the matter, but the arguments inevitably end with Chantal saying something like, “Look, Chris, if you really want to go, go! But I won’t go with you. How many years has it been since you knew Calum McKinley? He may have been nice and honest once, but you know what money and power does to people! Even people like him…!” And I can’t bear to leave her behind, never to see her again, and she could be right about money and power…

Ah, lies! What a world we live in! that we cannot trust anyone who simply asks for it. I have seen McKinley, or one of his contemporaries, on the TV, many times. He says that if you believe the future is bright, if you believe in the integrity of the human spirit, you can pass through - but if you believe the future is dark, that everyone is selfish and a deceiver, you will distrust him; and so he prevents dark-hearted, distrustful people from entering his utopia. His corporation has never forced or abducted anyone, so far as I know; subscription is purely voluntary. Hand over everything you own, and you’re on your way to paradise – or nuclear oblivion.

The problem is, if it were anyone but Calum McKinley behind this, I wouldn’t even be asking these questions. I wouldn’t put it past any large corporation to volatilise people for profit – especially when you can’t prove it one way or the other. We all know the mighty dollar is more important than human life. We are ruled by governments who insist on promoting more police powers in the name of law and order, ruled by corporations whose only concern is a fatter bottom line each year, in an overpopulated world where human life is becoming increasingly common – and cheap. With ten billion people now living on this planet, who knows what diabolical schemes our leaders have in place to try to keep the numbers down?

I keep thinking of that meeting McKinley had with the President of the US. Who convinced whom of what? Has my childhood friend finally succumbed to the lure of money and power and become a complete swine? Nobody has ever returned to verify whether the Genatia Corporation is telling the truth, and no more samples from other worlds have been forthcoming.

Perhaps I’m just being paranoid. With what this world is turning into, with the prospect of greater poverty for most and unspeakable wealth for a few, I’m beginning to think that even if the fate that awaits McKinley’s intrepid travellers is a nuclear death, it is preferable to waiting out my life here. Waiting, knowing that the world is going to hell while the portal to heaven lies freely open above us.

After all, I’m nearing sixty now, and I feel that Chantal is beginning to crack under the repeated arguments. One day, I may be able to persuade her to bring our son home, to hand over our possessions to Genatia. One day, I may persuade her to come with me.

One day, we will make our own leap of faith.

2. Postscript:

My grandfather wrote the preceding missive shortly before he enrolled in the Genatia project and came to Neoterra with his wife and son – my father. He kept it secret as long as he was alive; it was found amongst other papers in his files after his death at the age of eighty-nine. Perhaps he feared to contaminate our colony with such descriptions of jaded Earth as this, but I believe it is important to reveal it to those who, like myself, have never had to make Calum McKinley's leap of faith. What must it be like, to live in a world where nobody can trust anyone else, where everybody seems out for what they can gain from others? To have to sign over all you own for nothing but a promise – never knowing that you get your personal belongings back after leaving Earth? How does it feel to finally arrive here, to freely receive land and housing and resources to get you started in a new life – after all that uncertainty and fear? We were born into our Utopia, never having to face these things; yet it will not do for any of us to take our new society for granted. McKinley has given us the stars, and endless worlds for peaceful and free colonisation by honourable, trusting and trustworthy people. We have left all the greed, distrust and exploitation behind on Earth. It does seem utterly strange that we, who live in such an idyllic paradise as this, a paradise of our own making, could have come from a world so beset with fear and avarice and want. Such people, as make such a world, have no place here.

And it is in this that the wisdom of Calum McKinley, in demanding travellers hand over all their worldly wealth, in never allowing anyone to return to Earth and confirm the truth, is made plain.

-Quentin Connelly,
38th Uniary, 51 AC (24th May, 2072 AD)
Genaport, Neoterra (Tau Ceti 2)


- Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may attain to the tree of life,
and enter by the gates into the city.
Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers, the immoral, the murderous, and the idolators,
and all who are lovers of lies...
Rev. 22: 14-15.

[Wildwood]

WOW, so well written. I couldn't stop reading, lol! Absolutely brillant!!! Thank you for sharing your story with us!

[Revan]

Short?!

That was amazing, a very well done to you!