"How could I have died and gone to Hell without noticing the transition?" is the perfect opening line of "The Borders of Infinity," describing the Cetagandans' torture chamber for the Marilacan prisoners of war.
Rather than building walls, roofs, and floors and posting armed guards, the Cetagandans simply generate a force sphere, showing above ground as an opalescent force dome, perfectly circular, a half-kilometer wide.
With the force dome, the Cetagandans meet the treaty requirement in the cruelest way. So many square meters a person—make the dome just big enough. No solitary confinement—everyone is together with no privacy of any kind. No dark periods longer than 12 hours—no dark periods at all, just the same light, twenty-four hours a day forever. No beatings—with no guards in contact with the prisoners the guards can't beat the prisoners. No rapes by the guards—no contact with the guards handles that, but since the captors don't enforce any rules, if a prisoner rapes or beats another, too bad. No forced labor—no labor or work or occupation of any kind—nothing to do, forever.
Even the rule requiring access to medical personnel can work as torture if you confine the medically qualified prisoners with all the others, but don't give them any equipment or supplies.
Food is delivered when the Cetagandans bulge one side of the force dome. When the bulge disappears there is a small stack containing exactly one ration bar for every prisoner.
Arrayed against the Cetagandan technology is Miles, who starts out naked, and two spies among the Cetagandans, Elli and Elena, who have some means of burst-transmitting data to the Dendarii fleet.
Then, there's the final problem technology—the mechanics of the combat drop shuttle's ramp. With the recessed slot for the ramp inside the door, if the ramp gets damaged and jammed, the door can't close and that's not good for a combat shuttle taking off for space under combat conditions with pursuit.
As Miles arrives for his first visit to Earth, in Brothers in Arms, he can contemplate taking a submarine tour of "Lake Los Angeles" or visiting New York behind the famous dikes. London, his destination, has either settled or the ocean has risen—it is protected from the Thames and the ocean tides by a huge set of tall dikes.
While Miles is stuck in the Barrayaran embassy on Earth, he "gets" to attend ambassadorial receptions. One reception, with planetary representatives who speak no English, suffers because the keyed translator earbugs are misdelivered somewhere else in London, leaving them all just smiling and pantomiming. Alas, the replacements arrive before the interminable speeches.
Miles encounters body laser mapping and computer-controlled garment creation. An expensive store in the mall gives him a chance to buy a cultured "live" fur that seeks warmth and purrs. It's blended from the very finest assortment of Felis domesticus genes. It doesn't eat, shed, or need a litter box and is powered via an electromagnetic net at the cellular level, which passively gathers energy from the environment. If it seems to run down, the salesman points out, just put it in the microwave for a few minutes on the lowest setting, but "Cultured Furs cannot be responsible, however, for the results if the owner accidentally sets it on high." It makes an excellent blanket, spread, or throw rug.
In an assassination attempt to kill Admiral Naismith, the lift lorry at the spaceport shows that even a lift truck can rise up high enough to be entirely over one little admiral before its lift is shut off.
The Earth-side cell of Komarran terrorists gives Miles his first experience of being interrogated with fast-penta and he provides results unique to his warped biochemistry.
The action dissolves to a game of kill the clone in the dikes of London's Thames River. The dikes provide an unpopulated site for a game of stunner tag—though some of the players are cheating by using nerve disruptors. Moving up and down, inside and outside of the enormous structure, Miles puts to good use a powered rappelling harness with the ability to lift two or three people.
The best exploration of technology in Mirror Dance comes from the death of Miles and his re-"birth." But, before Miles can die, there's the fighting.
Mark impersonates Miles and steals the Ariel. Then he takes Bel Thorne and the Green Squad of commandos, led by Taura, down to the surface of Jackson's Whole to raid House Bharaputra's clone-raising facility.
The technologies in the fight aren't new or surprising to the series. The drop team wears half-armor as is common in normal temperatures and atmospheric pressures—space armor isn't needed. The half-armor starts with a full body and head cloth-suit containing nerve-disruptor shield net. Next comes torso armor that would stop anything from deadly needler-spines up to small hand-missiles. Over that goes a combat fabric uniform, with equipment belts and weapons. The backpack contains a one-man-sized plasma arc mirror field. Topping it off is the combat helmet, and since Mark is able to wear Admiral Naismith's equipment, he has plenty of command and control electronics.
Mark, Bel, and the team get delayed and surrounded, then trapped on the ground when their only drop shuttle is destroyed by a thermal grenade in the cockpit. All they can do is huddle with the valuable clone children around them.
Miles to the rescue! Wearing as much borrowed equipment as he can get that came close to fitting, Miles leads another drop team to the rescue.
A Bharaputran guard shoots Miles in the chest with a needle grenade. Since Miles's borrowed equipment doesn't include the torso armor, the fatal shot blows out his heart, lungs, and organs.
In this case, the future combat medics come with a portable cryo-chamber. Miles's throat is cut, his blood is drained and replaced with cryo-fluid, and he's put in the float cryo-chamber and frozen. Then, as the combat worsens, a medic takes Miles's portable cryo-chamber to the fully automated shipping department and ships him to an address on Jackson's Whole where he should be safe. Miles makes it to a cryo-revival facility, where they grow new organs for him and rebuild him.
A risk of returning to Jackson's Whole is that on their last visit, Miles and Taura destroyed Ryoval's tissue bank, used to construct genetic monsters as treats in his depraved bordello's dungeons.
When Baron Ryoval captures Mark, he is ready to spend years torturing him, thinking he's Miles, or using him for practice if he's actually the clone. Ryoval uses beatings, force feedings, and humiliation using violent aphrodisiacs and degradation—photographed from all angles by hovering (anti-gravity) holovid cameras.
Ryoval also skins Mark alive, not with knives but with a chemical spray that melts his skin off, leaving his raw tissues and pain nerve endings exposed to any touch—he can't sit, he can't lie down, he just stands, shifting from foot to foot till his legs give way.
The final item of technology is Ryoval's key to all his doors, archives, files, and his entire empire—in (what could be better?) a secret decoder ring.
At the beginning of Memory, Miles has been mustered out of the Imperial Service due to a case of seizures he picked up in the process of his death and cryo-revival.
The technology explored in the plot is Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip, which has helped him be such an effective administrator and a terror to subordinates, whose errors are never forgotten. The "chip" is actually a complex sandwich of organic and inorganic components placed between the hemispheres of Illyan's brain. It has a fiendishly ornate data-retrieval net and data storage with an autolearning-style system which installed itself after insertion. It has thousands and thousands of neuronic leads.
Now that complex device is breaking down, "turning to snot inside his head" as one of the medical staff puts it. Illyan is losing track of time, and memories from years before pop into his head as if real and current. Since the breakdown of the chip is unstoppable and irreversible, Miles, who is now the 800-pound Imperial Auditor, orders the chip removed and autopsied.
The thing that killed Illyan's eidetic memory chip is a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote or, as the scientist says, "A little bug that eats things." It barely qualifies as a life-form but it does eat, it manufactures an enzyme that will destroy the pro
tein matrix in Illyan's chip, and it reproduces itself—up to a point—then self-destructs.
The prokaryote started as a legitimate medical product but was modified to be specific for Illyan's chip. By the molecular evidence it looks like Jacksonian, rather than Cetagandan, work. Miles investigates Imperial Security, from the top floor down to the basement.
He finds that the building is almost as tight as a spaceship, with air filters and cleaners capable of handling poison gases. Locked in the basement evidence room, Miles finds the prokaryote on the shelf, evidence left over from a Komarran terrorist cell broken up some time back—and two vials are missing from the box.
It looks like an inside job with evidence left in the computer system showing that Miles himself probably stole the missing vials.
As Miles is now in charge of the investigation and knows he didn't enter the evidence vault, he knows that the secure computer system was diddled. A technical team is set to freezing and analyzing that system to determine who diddled it, and that traces back to another person Miles trusts, Duv Galeni.
Miles determines who the real culprit is but proving it takes technology and psychology. The technology comes from a spray that fluoresces in the presence of the prokaryote.
In the novel Komarr, technology makes life possible on Komarr, a marginal world. There's atmosphere but it's not suitable for humans due to the low oxygen content and cold temperatures—the people live in sealed domes.
With hope for the future, the Komarrans long ago built the enormous soletta array of orbital mirrors to reflect more sunlight down on their chilled world. It's the collision damage to the soletta array that brings Miles to Komarr. A freighter has slammed edge-on into the array, destroying three of the seven hexagonally arranged mirrors. The central seventh mirror is dulled.
Miles, as a newly appointed Imperial Auditor, goes to Komarr to see what effects the soletta disaster will have on the project.
Though the soletta mirrors only increase the insolation by a percentage, it's a critical percentage to foster plant growth in the ecology outside the domes. Even inside the domes, extra lights need to be rigged for the dome's ornamental plants because of the disaster. No plants are purely ornamental on a closed, dome world; they provide much of the breathable oxygen.
Increasing the planetary oxygen percentage is part of Komarran's Terraforming project, as they use plant growth and even peat bogs to break the carbon from the excess carbon dioxide and sequester the carbon long-term.
Besides the soletta mirrors, the Terraforming project also warms Komarr with waste heat power plants. There's no need to conserve energy in the cities—all energy produces waste heat that warms the world.
The soletta accident was caused by a branch of the Komarran resistance which was formed around an N-space (wormhole interstellar drive) mathematician who thinks he's discovered a way to destabilize a wormhole and close it permanently.
Already, two of their people were killed in the soletta accident. Their large test prototype, a single, funnel-corkscrew Necklin rod, was mounted on the soletta array and pointed at an unused wormhole. When an ore freighter crossed the beam, it was, somehow, sucked into the transmitter on the soletta array, damaging the array.
To the remaining conspirators, working without the test's instrument readings, the accident looks like just a fluke of traffic. The full-size device might well work.
If it works as planned and the wormhole permanently collapses, Barrayar will be cut off from galactic civilization, since it has only one wormhole to the outside, the one through Komarr—a new Time of Isolation will begin that may last hundreds or thousands of years or longer.
A trivial side technology is a necklace with a small globe of Barrayar accurate down to the one-meter scale.
A Civil Campaign begins back on Barrayar. Two technologically inspired issues involving inheritance of countships are important to the story.
Count René Vorbretten just had an unpleasant encounter with technology when he and his countess went for gene analysis, preparatory to starting their first baby in a uterine replicator. The analysis showed that René's grandfather, the seventh count of the line, was not descended from the sixth count, but from a Cetagandan invader and the sixth count's wife.
A family branch with an untainted bloodline sued in the Council of Counts for the fraudulent inheritance to be voided and the countship to be passed to the senior male in their line.
In another case, Count Vorrutyer died suddenly and his sister, Lady Donna Vorrutyer, filed a motion of impediment with the Council of Counts to block the automatic inheritance of a hated cousin Richars. Then, Lady Donna disappeared on her way to Beta Colony. Speculation is rife on what she'll bring back, an unknown brother or a clone of her late brother, the count. The surprise comes when she returns as the brother of the late count, having had a Betan sex-change operation.
Beta Colony's technical supremacy means that the sex change from Lady Donna to Lord Dono is fully functional with cloned and force-grown parts. In particular, the testicles (the part necessary for inheritance) are her DNA with the Y chromosome taken from her late brother (incidentally made genetic-defect-free in the process).
Now, Lord Dono wants to inherit the district countship from "his" brother, claiming status as the closest "male" relative.
The final technological issue is the side story of Mark, who returns to Barrayar for the summer and the Emperor's wedding with eight thousand incredibly ugly bugs and their creator.
The bugs are simply the carriers of a "carefully-orchestrated array of symbiotic bacteria" which take the ingested food and produce "bug butter," the perfect food, completely nutritionally balanced. But the "butter bugs" are repulsive.
Because the bug's ugliness is a marketing problem, Ekaterin is hired to create a "glorious" bug. Once the bug's creator modifies the bugs' genetics to make them breed true in the new appearance, a lot of the sales resistance melts away.
Body modifications, a space habitat, and bioweapons are the starring technologies in Diplomatic Immunity, as the belated honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin gets interrupted to solve a crisis in a remote corner of the wormhole nexus.
Four-armed, free-fall-adapted quaddies have made their home in a remote, planetless solar system. A Komarran trade fleet with Barrayaran military escort has become enmeshed with the quaddies when an officer disappears. Several liters of the officer's blood (confirmed by DNA analysis) are found on the deck in an empty ship loading bay.
Another character is a human-amphibian who survives an attack from a Cetagandan bioweapon.
A Cetagandan ba has "kidnapped" a thousand haut children, yet to be born and still in their uterine replicators. The ba is fleeing pursuit desperately and is willing to use the haut bioweapons on as many people as necessary to escape. The ba's main weapon is an engineered organism that reproduces in the blood of the victim and builds reservoirs of chemicals. When a critical mass is reached, the chemicals are released and combine. So much heat is produced the victim melts into a puddle over a few hours.
"Winterfair Gifts," the wedding story of Miles and Ekaterin, manages to stay firmly within the normal home environment of Vorkosigan House and Vorbarr Sultana. The Jacksonian neurotoxin and ImpSec's forensics lab are the only exotic technologies used—along with Sergeant Taura's bioengineered, enhanced vision, which saves the day.
Listed last though it takes place two hundred years before Shards of Honor, Falling Free has no Vorkosigans—it's about the origin of the quaddies.
Before the development of artificial gravity, space workers may only spend limited time in zero-gee. Their bones weaken and their bodies degrade. To eliminate this extra expense, GalacTech has bioengineered a stable race of four-armed humans who are biologically adapted to free fall.
Just as the oldest group is ready for their first job, artificial gravity technology is announced. GalacTech wants to cut their losses by stranding the zero-gee adapted race on the planetary surface, but the quaddies decide to flee.
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br /> The habitat is modular and the quaddies disassemble it even though it takes tiny explosives to break the decades-long vacuum welding of the clamps holding it in the old configuration.
The solar panels are folded and the modules are reconfigured to fit the tubular volume that will fit inside a "super-jumper." The super-jumper is a ship capable of traveling through the wormholes between stars. It has four arms arching back along the cargo. Two are for normal space engines. The other two house the Necklin rods to generate the fields allowing the ship to drop out of normal space into the wormhole.
Laser soldering guns have the safeties removed to make real guns for the hijacking of the super-jumper.
An accident damages a vortex mirror which reflects the field at the end of the Necklin rod, ruining the entire ship. The titanium vortex mirror is made in a complex shape to angstrom tolerances.
Leo Graff, the engineering instructor, has read about the crude method used to make trial units—explosive forming. All of the habitat's titanium is melted using laser units and then zero-gee splat-cooled into almost the right shape to make the metal blank for the final forming. Using the identical mirror from the other Necklin rod arm, they make a meters-thick mold out of ice. The large titanium blank is explosively molded to it using a common chemical mixed with gasoline. The resultant shaped blank is made angstrom-perfect with a final laser polish.
Lois writes stories about people, their interactions, their problems, and their heart-tearing striving to overcome their faults. Her Vorkosigan stories are the best of science fiction, as she uses science and technology as the environment and often the cause or solution to the truly human problems of her characters. And besides, she likes to torment the living daylights out of her victims.
APPRECIATIONS
Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold, or Thank You, but I Already Have a Life
The Vorkosigan Companion Page 13