Throughout the writing of the Omega City books, it was important to me that, whenever possible, Gillian and her friends deal with things that exist in the real world. Since these are books about truth and lies, I wanted to portray a world as close to the truth as I could make it. Though Omega City, Eureka Cove, and Infinity Base may be fictional, I wanted the technologies and experiments they found there to be things that used to exist, already exist, or theoretically exist and may be made reality in the near future.
Sometimes, I found, my writing moved slower than the pace of invention, and certain technologies (like self-driving cars) became commercially available sooner than I’d expected. Whoopee!
In space tech, we’re a little behind the Shepherds when it comes to work on things like artificial gravity and health of our space travelers. Currently, the record for Americans in space is held by Astronaut Scott Kelly, with 340 days in 2015–2016 (slightly more than Dr. Underberg did, though Kelly is way healthier, I hope!). The world record is held by Russian Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, with 438 days, back in the 1990s.
I’ve read the reports on the amount of radiation they were exposed to, and the eye damage astronauts suffer in microgravity. Space is . . . not good for our delicate human bodies, I’m sorry to say. But I’m hopeful that if we keep working on these problems, space travel will become as probable as self-driving cars, because I still want to go . . . don’t you?
Unfortunately, just like the tech is real, other aspects of this story are real as well. There are companies and organizations out there like Guidant and the Shepherds who are dedicated to lying to the public in order to make themselves rich and successful. I don’t necessarily think any of them have a super cool space station hidden among the stars, but they can still hurt us with their deception. It’s up to us—just like it was to Gillian, Eric, Savannah, Howard, and Nate—to ask questions, dig deeper, and discover the truth, no matter how complicated or difficult it might be.
Keep searching!