New Tomorrow

The New Tomorrow was a purported time-travel device designed by John Henry Parman and built and marketed by Parman Industries. The failure/fraud of the machine stands as the direct cause of the The Hard Rain.

Design

The basic design of the craft was built around accepted rocket mechanics to enable an extremely high-velocity low-earth orbit. Parman expanded upon these principles with a number of "innovations" of his own, with the stated goal of creating single-passenger capsules capable of using the Earth's natural gravitational pull to exceed the speed of light. These "innovations" included:

P-Valve Air Circulation System

Because of the small size of the New Tomorrow (2.6m x .65m x .7m) and smaller passenger hold (.605m cubed), air circulation was a major concern in the development phase. As the craft was designed to fly at much higher altitudes (and thus through much thinner atmosphere) than passenger aircraft, standard systems were deemed non-viable. Parman Industries designed the P-Valve to deal with this issue. A series of micro-holes covering the body - almost like a mesh - were fitted via nanotechnology with a patented valve system which would supposedly be sensitive enough to only open at extreme altitudes (and thus close on re-entry) and would allow what little atmosphere there was to be captured to flow in, with the resulting carbon dioxide able to flow out.

Initial reports from the wreckages of the Hard Rain and subsequent autopsies strongly suggest that the technology in place to open and close the valve system did, in fact, succeed. None of the bodies found seemed to have perished of asphyxiation, and the passenger holds - where the structural integrity of the crafts were still intact - indeed contained atmospheric gases, albeit at very low temperatures.

The biggest problem with the P-Valve appears to be that of not withstanding the wear and tear of the speeds the New Tomorrow was capable of reaching. The bodies recovered from the Hard Rain showed clear signs of having frozen post-mortem. The current theory holds that high velocities prevented the valves from closing properly, and that the P-Valve resulted in exposing the corpses to the frigid temperatures surrounding the craft.

Parman G-Force Correction Technology

Because the physical affects of such travel velocity were (in theory) exponentially beyond those of space travel, a solution was needed to ensure passenger safety. the Parman G-Force Correction Technology was supposed to solve this problem, but the design - by Parman himself - remained proprietary.

Autopsies suggested that g-forces indeed were the primary cause of death for the New Tomorrow adopters, and subsequent research has led most to believe that no correction technology was in fact implemented at all.

P-Curve Aerodynamic Solution

The biggest issue for Parman was not about safety, however, but rather of how to make the machine work at all. Drawing from his background as a successful defense contractor, Parman designed the "P-Curve," an aerodynamic model which would allow, under the right circumstances, for a craft to continually "fall" towards earth, building speed, while never actually losing height.

The second important aspect of the P-Curve is that of creating such a minimal drag coefficient as to be negligible. Only by doing this would the New Tomorrow be capable of ignoring the principals of Terminal Velocity and attain faster-than-light speeds.

The P-Curve was central to the very notion of the New Tomorrow, and the model itself brought in massive amounts of government investment. It is notable that of all Parman's innovations, the P-Curve came closest to working as intended. While the second function did not operate properly (though very low, the drag coefficient was still much to high to allow to craft to reach anywhere close to 299,792,458 m/s), the first function operated more-or-less according to plan, and is still utilized by military agencies in the design of spy-planes so as to conserve fuel between take-off and landing on extended missions.

Marketing

After obtaining patents on both the P-Curve and P-Valve, Parman shopped his new inventions to the United States Department of Defense, which was satisfied with field tests of both of them. (Note: the DoD did not attempt the P-Valve technology under the same conditions as the New Tomorrow, nor does the evidence suggest that it intended it for that use. Parman also did not present the P-Curve as a terminal velocity workaround, likely because he had either planned to keep that aspect proprietary, or else knew that it would fail and did not wish to have public data on the matter.)

After the DoD had sunk millions of dollars into investment in the technology, Parman unvelied his invention with a well-publicized human trial, manned by one Ivan Garza, of the United States Air Force. He then announced an Initial Public Offering on New Tomorrow, Inc., the subsidiary of Parman Industries in charge of the manufacture and sale of the invention.

Five years, two months, and sixteen days after the launch, according to declassified military records, Garza's craft re-entered the atmosphere and plummeted, flaming, to the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Deeds Report would later show that the DoD covertly recovered the crash and found Garza's remains to be little more than a disfigured skeleton and some frozen, gangrenous flesh, but that the U.S. had long-since issued a whisper campaign about the technology as a deterrent to other nations, and thus were reticent about it publicly being known as a failure. Parman, with DoD support, staged a fake recovery of a happy and healthy Garza stand-in not far off the coast of San Francisco.

After a change in administrations, and an uncommonly sweeping overhaul in the top officials at the DoD (which many believe Parman may have had a back-room hand in instrumenting) Parman introduced the New Tomorrow for commercial use. It is believed that mysterious deaths and blackmail kept those who knew the true fate of Ivan Garza quiet, and allowed Parman to silence or else drown out his critics within the scientific community as to the faults in his design, but little has been proven as to this matter.

Parman focused his marketing on the Earth's most wealthy one-percent, employing celebrated financial advisers to put their financial affairs in such order that they'd be many times richer upon their return in a little over five years time. After an exhausting schedule of personal meetings, a substantial majority of this demographic signed up for the travel.

Parman commenced his invention with Parman Day, which launched the first 25% of interested parties, with 75% to follow in the next two weeks. Notably, just under 10% had opted to wait out the next five years before joining onto the program.

The Hard Rain

A little over five years after Parman Day, the New Tomorrow craft #10131 skidded to a halt outside Coffeyville, KS. Parman Industries records claimed that the skeleton inside belonged to Francis Deleon, which dental records later confirmed. #10131 is not believed to have been the first New Tomorrow craft to have re-entered, but rather the first to have done so on dry land near a populated area.

Thousands of other crafts followed soon after, with no surviving passengers. With the mass demise of most of the wealthiest members of society, the Modern Eruption soon followed. John Henry Parman, meanwhile, lived comfortably at his estate on Parman Island near New Zealand until his apprehension and execution by the self-proclaimed Denton Cowboys.

Category:Falling_Bodies

Published under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 license.