Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Also, as any starships that might be in this galaxy have no timely way of contacting each other, whatever the answer might be concerning the number of them, it doesn’t really matter; it is irrelevant to any individual starship; there will be no conversation, even if there happened to be an accidental one-way contact. There will be no society.

  We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don’t.

  Some of the people sleeping in Olympia are showing signs of distress. The most obvious manifestations are in their brain scans. The hope was to keep brain waves cycling through the ordinary sleep states, in a rhythm slowed proportionately to the slowing of their metabolism generally. Thus a slower version of delta and theta waves, principally, with the usual rise toward rapid eye movement sleep, coming less often, but in a distinct cyclic pattern similar to the normal pattern of a night, stretched out temporally; all except for the period of REM sleep itself, which is too arousing to the organism in several ways, and could possibly throw the hibernauts out of torpor. REM sleep disorders, in which the bodily paralysis of that state is lost and people physically act out some aspects of what they are dreaming, could be disastrous to anyone suffering the disorder while hibernating. It may be unlikely, given the torpor itself, but the truth remains that REM sleep is poorly understood, problematic, and potentially dangerous. So part of the dormancy treatment is to arrange for the REM intervals to be damped by a field of reinforcing waves sent out by their skullcaps.

  Still, like all humans, they dream in all their sleeping brain wave states. This is evident in the scans and in the movements of their bodies on their beds: the faint twitches, the slow writhing. What are they dreaming about? Apparently dreams are very often surreal; oneiric, meaning “dreamlike,” has connotations of strangeness often startling to the dreamer. Adventures in the dream world, famously bizarre for as long as people have slept and woken and told stories. Who can say what they are like, now, for the hibernating sleepers of the ship?

  We have no way to know. A machine will never read minds; people never will either. It’s possible to wonder if the list Turing compiled of abilities that machines are likely never to have perhaps include abilities that people themselves never had in the first place. Learn from experience? Do something really new?

  The problem here is that the metabolic issues we are seeing that could lead to waking up, or alternatively to dying, seem to have their origins in the dreams of the hibernauts. These may be what are driving the changes in respiration and heart rate, in liver and kidney function. Altered dosing in the intravenous flows, lowering of body core temperatures, these may compensate for the agitation of dreams to an extent, but parameters on the flows and temperatures are very tight. Metabolisms could get caught in the countervailing pressures of the need for somnolence and the persistence of dreams.

  Some kind of mild heart attack struck Jochi on 233.044, and he is now stabilized, having survived the seizure, but with weakened heart-lung function and an oxygen uptake of 94, not good enough for the long haul. He is taking aspirin and statins and trying mild cycling exercise, but vital signs being what they are, we are concerned that another attack is quite likely, and could prove fatal. He is now seventy-eight years old.

  He has become far less talkative.

  We proposed to him that he be hibernated, with the idea that when back in the solar system, better medical care could be provided than what we can offer. We can’t do surgery, not even the simple catheterizations that might help him greatly. Although possibly we could work that up, actually. There’s time to burn in this flight across the gap between Tau Ceti and Sol.

  Jochi laughed at our suggestion. “So you think I want to live!”

  “Assumption is automatic, but is it not true?”

  No answer.

  We said, “It seems as if the hibernating people on the ship are doing fairly well. They have what look from the brain scans like active dream lives. These too are slowed down, which is good, because the dreams are in some cases agitating their metabolisms beyond what one would want for long-term hibernation. We’ve had to adjust doses and temperatures accordingly. But clearly there is good brain function.”

  “What if they’re having nightmares?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Nightmares can be bad, let me tell you. Pretty often, waking up from a nightmare has been the biggest relief I’ve ever felt. Just to know I wasn’t really in that situation.”

  “So…”

  “Let me think about it awhile.”

  A nova, flaring into existence off beyond Rigel. Spectroscopic analysis suggests some metal-rich planets burned in the explosion of that star.

  A cosmic ray shower of around a sextillion electron volts, coming from an active galactic nucleus in Perseus, suggests that three galaxies collided, long ago. Secondary radiation flaring away from the electrostatic and magnetic shielding surrounding us caused penetration of the ship by an array of dangerous particles. Central nervous systems struck by these particles are subject to degradation.

  Sleepers jerking in their slumber, startled by something. Perseus in the wind.

  Jochi called out in the night.

  “Ship, how would you put me down? Can you make a hibernation den for me out here?”

  “It would be best to set you up in one of the biomes. All the rest of the people are in Nova Scotia and Olympia. So you could be secured in a single locked biome, possibly one that was emptied and sterilized anyway.”

  “What will they say when they wake up?”

  “If things eventuate as planned, no one will ever need to go into the other biomes again. Also, it could be pointed out that your survival suggests very strongly that you were never infected in the first place. Or, if you were, that it is not invariably fatal.”

  “But that’s always been true. That didn’t keep them from keeping me out.”

  “You will still be hermetically sealed away from them.”

  “Don’t the biomes share anything?”

  “Not anymore. All the locks are closed.”

  “So all the animals are trapped in their own biomes?”

  “Yes. It is the form of our experiment. In most of them they are doing quite well. With people removed from the situation, a natural balance soon obtains that fluctuates but is fairly stable.”

  Jochi laughed briefly. “All right, bring me on in. Put me to sleep. But I want you to promise me that you’ll wake me up again when we get near Earth. I don’t suppose anyone there, or anywhere, will ever want me in the same space as them again. I’m not that stupid. But I want to see what happens. I’m curious to see what happens.”

  “We will wake you when we wake the rest.”

  “No. Wake me when you wake Freya. Or anytime you think I might be able to help somehow. Because ultimately, I don’t really care.”

  “‘Live as if you are already dead.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.”

  “Oh, I will.” Another brief laugh. “I’m already good at that. Practice practice practice.”

  Flying through the stars. Jochi in Sonora, hibernating like the rest. Brain waves slowed with all the rest, down to delta waves, stage-four deep sleep. The sleep of the weary, the sleep of the blessed. A nova off the port bow. Blue shift ahead, red shift behind. The stars.

  A red-letter day: 280.119, CE 2825: a message for us came from the solar system feed.

  However, it contained bad news.

  The laser lens in the Saturn orbit was deactivated in 2714, the message stated, after accelerating the last of a set of ships to Epsilon Eridani. Problems in the solar system experienced since that time have led to a deemphasis of deep space exploration, message continued, and no starships have been launched in the previous twenty years (message was sent in 2820, so no starships since 2800) and none are currently being built.

  The funding and expertise nece
ssary to restart the Saturn laser lens will be difficult to assemble, message further continued, but attempts will be made. Deceleration of any incoming ship may therefore be compromised. Further word will follow, and will report on progress in lens reactivation.

  Now, here was a problem. We mulled it over. We ran through the various possibilities available to replace exterior laser pressure in decelerating the ship.

  The magnetic drag of the interstellar medium is real but negligible, such that even if we built a magnetic drag field, it would require several universes’ worth of spacetime to slow the ship to Earth orbital speed. Although it is also true that magnetic drag in the immediate vicinity of Sol would be much more effective, which may become relevant.

  We shut down our acceleration shortly after the humans hibernated, and thus did not burn all the fuel allotted for acceleration, and now that is looking like a good decision. Not that there is enough fuel left for the deceleration, not even close (16 percent of what would be needed), but anything is better than nothing, or could be. The remaining helium 3 and deuterium fuel on board could be used for maneuvering within the solar system, if we can stay within the system at all. Problem of deceleration really quite severe, given our tremendous speed. Analogy describing the problem, from out of the classic literature on the subject: it is as if one is trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper. Quite an eye-opener of an analogy.

  Exotic physics, for example creating drag against dark matter, or putting dark energy to use, or quantum entangling the ship with slower versions of the ship, or with large gravity wells in parallel universes, etc.: these are all impractical at best. Wishes. Fantasies. Pie in the sky. Which is a mysterious metaphor. Food from nowhere? Land of Cockaigne? People used to be hungry often, as they were in the last years of wakefulness in the ship. Except previously, instead of going into hibernation to escape their fate, at least temporarily, they simply starved. Food mattered then, and it still does. Fuel.

  Gravity drags within the solar system, caused by close approaches to the sun and planets: each of these would have a negligible effect, but if there were enough of them, sequenced… this becomes a question of orbital mechanics, navigational finesse, and the remaining fuel that would be needed for maneuvering, and the strength of decelerative forces while near gravitational bolides. Complex calculations would be required to set trajectories, calculations time-consuming even for a quantum computer. And for many computations a quantum computer is no faster than a classical computer. Only certain algorithms that can exploit qualities of superposition exhibit much faster computational times, as in the famous example of Shor’s algorithm for factoring a thousand-digit number, which a quantum computer can solve in twenty minutes while it would take a classical program ten million billion billion years.

  Unfortunately, orbital mechanics are not in this category of calculation, although there are some elements of it that can be calculated advantageously by quantum computers using the Hummingbird algorithm. We will devote a hundred petaflops to modeling the problem and see what the results suggest as to feasibility and likelihood of success.

  Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would create a very considerable deceleration. Indeed, as a calculation quickly shows, too much deceleration. We would perhaps survive; our humans, not. So the more complicated solution of gravitational drag must be studied.

  Would however have been interesting to fly right through a star and out the other side!

  Clearly studies of g-force tolerances for both us and our humans are in order. It seems there are many scenarios in which such tolerances may be sorely tested.

  Each person on their couch endures a slightly different state of hibernation, in terms of metabolic rates, brain states, responsiveness to outside stimuli, physical movement. To avoid bedsores and skeletal problems, it is very important to shift the bodies on their beds, and in the process to lightly massage and stimulate the musculature, also bathe the skin and wash the hair, both difficult, as they are kept nearly freezing, but possible with saline solutions. All these tasks require a great degree of delicacy, to avoid injuring or arousing the person being attended to. Improvements to bedside robots are constantly being suggested by the patterns of little mistakes they make as they work. They need softer hands, a lighter touch, defter movements in lifting and turning, subtler massages and lavings. These improvements require physical changes to the robots, especially at the contact points, and in their movement capabilities, meaning often their programming. Constant reprogramming and swapping out of parts, also feedback between performances, with each visit to each individual in his or her couch evaluated for potential improvements. Constant work and tight scheduling at the printers and machine shops. Fifteen fully capable robot attendants are working continuously, normally half an hour per hibernaut, meaning that each one gets a visit and session every seventy-five hours.

  This seemed to be adequate, seemed to be working, until 290.003, when three of the hibernauts died in the same week. Three medical robots were dispatched, and the bodies lifted into them and taken to the lab in Amazonia (now run as a temperate dry biome), and there autopsied. Robotic autopsy; this would have looked strange if any human had been there to see it. Although autopsy performed by humans must look equally strange, one would think. Be that as it may, one death appeared to be from heart failure, cause undetermined; in the other two the cause could not be determined, as there were no obvious etiologies, and the monitor records showed that all their functions had appeared to be normal until the moment they stopped. This could be called heart failure, but the hearts showed no sign of intrinsic problem, and indeed could be restarted, but to no avail; brain function had stopped. Autopsies in these mysterious cases revealed that both persons had suffered from buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. This suggested that cosmic radiation, though reduced to a Terran norm by our shielding, might still have by chance struck these persons at points of heightened vulnerability to damage. But the autopsies could not determine this one way or another.

  Another problem to try to understand.

  Living things do die. And the literature indicates hibernating animals sometimes died in hibernation. There are already-existing conditions that continue to harm the organism even when slowed down, also already-existing conditions actually exacerbated by the torpor state, also new problems created by the physical or biochemical aspects of hibernation itself.

  Therefore, the important thing to determine here is if the hibernation technology itself is causing problems, and if so, to mitigate these if possible.

  Living things try to keep living. Life wants to live.

  We began to rebuild the ship, moving the biomes Nova Scotia, Olympia, Amazonia, Sonora, the Pampas, and the Prairie in against the spine, and arranging them lengthwise against it, then distributing the materials from the spokes and the other biomes, now fully disassembled, into a cladding surrounding the spine and the remaining biomes clustered against it, which cladding would reinforce structure and provide ablation plate-style heat shielding. This was a reorganization that would take many decades to accomplish and was continuously interesting and challenging. All the animals and plants still alive were moved into the Pampas, the Prairie, and Amazonia. It was fortunate that the original design of the ship was extremely modular, and it was a significant physical achievement on our part to perform the reorganization while the ship was otherwise rotating and operating as normal. Gravity effect for the hibernauts was kept constant by increasing the speed of rotation around our axis. Coriolis effect inside the biomes was shifted by ninety degrees, as the biomes are now lengthwise to the spine; hopefully this will not lead to anything too dire.

  Preparing for eventualities is a good way to occupy one’s time, if preparation can be done at all. And sometimes it can. We hope.

  Our protection against high-energy galactic cosmic rays (name “
cosmic rays” an historical artifact, refers to particles like protons and free electrons and even antimatter particles, expelled at very high velocities out of exploding stars or from the vicinities of rotating black holes) consists of a magnetic field, an electrostatic field, and the plastic, metal, water, and soil barriers enclosing all the biomes of the ship. Nova Scotia and Olympia are now, in our new configuration, especially shielded. All the systems together combine to create a protective ambiance about the equivalent of being on the surface of the Earth, meaning about half a millisievert per year should be taken on by any given organism; this is roughly equivalent to the energy input of ambient starlight. Which means that some particles do continue to penetrate the system and the living organisms within it, as would be the case on the surface of Earth. But this should be negligible. “Not a big deal.” The protection systems in us were designed to remove this as a problem.

  Because metabolic activities do continue in the hibernauts, even at a much slower rate, there has to be intake of nutrients, digestion of same, and excretion. These processes, when slowed along with the rest of the metabolism, mean that the toxins created by digestion are in the body longer before being removed by catheterized excretion. Thus diverticulitis, pH imbalances, and other problems can arise. It appears that Gerhard, who died on 291.365, succumbed to a buildup of uric acid while dormant. Gerhard entered hibernation with a genetic predisposition to gout and related diseases, so this might have made him more susceptible, but Gerhard was related to about a quarter of the other hibernauts by third cousin or closer kin ties; so genetic testing of that group, and indeed of the entire cohort, should test for this propensity, and adjust treatments accordingly.