The Death of the Universe: Ghost Kingdom: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 2)

by Brandon Q Morris

  Ada started feeling nauseated. She pulled the pants leg down. Spots of moisture had formed under it. The corpse was thawing out faster than expected. She held the thigh still with three hands and pushed the saw once more through the frozen flesh, close to the first cut. The resulting slice was about half a centimeter thick. That would definitely be too much for the microscope. But she couldn’t do any better with the circular saw.

  Ada passed Valentina the slice. “Hurry,” she said. “I hope you can do something with that.”

  “Do you want to see it too?” Valja asked.

  “No thanks, you go ahead. I’ll tidy up here in the meantime.”

  Valentina left the workstation and headed to the lab. Ada picked up the leg with her left hands and the rest of the body with her right. Tomorrow they’d give Zhenyi and Kepler a space burial, but until then they’d have to make do with the unheated storage room. The day after that, she and Valentina could make their way home. Hopefully Valja wouldn’t find anything that would upset their plans again.

  Valja came into the control room looking downcast.

  “And? How does it look?” asked Ada.

  “Nothing surprising. All the cells are definitely of biological origin. Except for the nano-manipulators, of course. But I did notice something strange about those. The oldest are no more than 23,000 cycles old. Nano-manipulators aren’t indestructible, but they usually remain functional for more than 100,000 cycles. Why does Kepler only have fresh nanos in his body?”

  “Something must have happened to him 23,000 cycles ago,” said Ada.

  “You find young nano-manipulators like that in bodies that have been freshly cloned. Could it be that Kepler got a new body at that time?”

  “As far as I know, it was essential for him to keep his original body. He even travels in it quite often. At least that’s what he told me. That time on the Mario—well, you were there too, before we caught the thieves.”

  “I remember,” said Ada. “That’s really strange. But it fits with the story Zhenyi told us. And when did the nanomachines switch off?”

  “They discontinued their work 46 hours ago. That could have been Kepler’s time of death.”

  “It was... wait a minute.” Ada pulled up a submenu on the screen. “It was exactly the time that you pressed the trigger.”

  “Thanks for reminding me of that.”

  “Sorry, my love. But I’m sure you’re probably remembering quite clearly yourself. It wasn’t your fault. You saved us. If we hadn’t fired, we’d be lying on the slab ourselves, and Zhenyi and Kepler would be dead anyway. Or do you believe they’d have gotten away from the other eighty-eight ships? Never in a million light-years. They were dead the moment they decided not to surrender.”

  “You’re right. But I still feel responsible. I pressed the button.”

  “Maybe they wanted to die,” Ada speculated. “Or it was very badly planned. If they’d been planning all along to shoot us, then they would have been wearing spacesuits, like we were. It was either a spontaneous decision, or we simply aren’t seeing the big picture.”

  “They’re dead. We can’t ask them now anyway.”

  “That’s true. But something’s not right here. I’ll have to examine the ship again. No matter what they do, everyone always leaves traces and clues. Maybe I’ll find something. Are you coming?”

  “No, Ada, I really don’t feel like it just now. I think I need to lie down for a bit.”

  “Then you do that, my love. We’ll see each other later.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s no one on that ship anymore.”

  An hour later Ada went through the airlock of the enemy ship. Now the emergency lighting was on in the corridor, too. The energy reserves were apparently running low. A gigacycle ago she would have tried to salvage the ship. It appeared to be a ninety-niner, after all. But humanity’s need for ships was limited. The repair wouldn’t be cheap and it would take a long time, because there was only one remaining shipyard.

  It would be interesting to steer the ship toward the alleged gravastar. That would be an experiment with an exciting result, which would reveal more to them about the nature of the object. But it was too close to the Gigadyson for that. They couldn’t exclude the possibility that the impact of such a large mass on the gravastar would lead to an explosion that could damage the Gigadyson. Then Kepler and Zhenyi would have achieved their goal after all. If that was their true goal.

  Ada floated through the corridor toward the control room. She had no idea what kind of traces she was looking for. The railgun hits and the resulting loss of gravity had made quite a mess of things. Ada rose to the ceiling and examined the holes. They were the diameter of an arm and their edges were clean-cut. She had to be careful not to slice open her spacesuit on them. Actually, why was there no gravity anymore? What the crew experienced as gravity was created by the ship rotating on its main axis. But the railguns hadn’t brought the ship’s rotation to a standstill. Zhenyi or Kepler must have set one of the corrective drives to stop the rotation.

  Ada looked for the control computer. It was by the commander’s seat, as expected. She floated over to it, but the computer would no longer rise up. She crept around it and found a hole. The shot had also sheared off the cable. She couldn’t repair it now. She pushed off and drifted back toward the ceiling.

  On the opposite wall was a robot that hadn’t fallen down, so it must have been anchored to the wall. She knew the model. It was the same as the ones used at the control stations. And she had caught Zhenyi in one of those robots. If she hadn’t managed to escape them then, maybe she wouldn’t have come to this terrible end. But this couldn’t be the robot Zhenyi used, because that was still in the Mario’s storage bay.

  So what was this robot doing here in the control room? Ships didn’t usually carry this type at all. Ada examined the specimen. It showed definite signs of use, but that didn’t mean anything. Who had used it? If it had housed a consciousness, there might be traces of it in the memory. They were always deleted at every reset, but with a bit of luck she might stumble across a few remnants.

  Ada looked around but found no functional computer she could use to analyze the memory. She’d have to take the robot back to the Mario with her. She unplugged the spinal cable from the lower body, opened the wall bracket, and shunted the upper body toward the exit. Half a robot tumbled through the control room.

  Was that everything she needed to do here? She’d found Zhenyi’s body in front of the transmission terminal. Either this was a coincidence, or she’d sent something out shortly before her death. Of course—they had been communicating. It was logical that Zhenyi had died in front of the terminal. It was more inexplicable that Kepler hadn’t been by her side at that moment. But maybe he was pulled away as the air got sucked into the vacuum.

  Ada drifted down to the transmitter. Its dedicated computer still functioned. It must have its own power supply. She pulled up the records. The computer didn’t save any content, only the time and destination of the transmission. And this was where it got interesting. The last exchange was with the Mario. But before that the ship had sent a comprehensive data package to a Gigadyson control station. The size of the data package was typical for a human consciousness.

  “Can you help me?” Ada called.

  Taking just the robot’s upper body with her to the Mario had been a bad idea. If it still had its legs, it could have walked by itself, but now she had to drag it. Unlike on the wreck, there was normal gravity on the Mario, and the upper body of the service robot weighed almost 100 kilograms.

  “And, lift!” said Valja.

  They both lifted the robot at the same time. Valentina was carrying the head, Ada had the other end. It was awkward because there was nothing for her to grasp, but with her four arms she was able to manage. They dragged the incomplete machine into the control room. They put it down next to Ada’s seat.

  “Will that do?” asked Valja.

  �
��Yeah, I can easily reach it with the service cable.”

  Ada brought an adapter from the workshop to connect the robot to the main computer. The Mario never traveled with this kind of robot, so there were no interface jacks like the ones in a shuttle or on a control station. Ada plugged the cable in and launched the diagnostic program. As expected, the memory had been wiped. Maybe she’d have more success with the memory nodes in the limbs? They also contained general information about things like how far the robot had moved. But everything was clean. The reset program clearly had no weak points.

  So she’d have to dig deeper. All memory storage systems worked using particular physical processes. And in reality, physical processes could never be entirely reversed. Even if you reset the memory cells to zero, some of the earlier memory remained. The problem could be minimized by repeatedly wiping the memory and overwriting it with incidental values, but it couldn’t be completely deleted. So, she needed to search for those kinds of left-overs—residual memory. If she was really fortunate, she’d find residual memory she could reconstruct at least a couple of pieces of data from. It would be enough if she could detect some kind of trace that led her to identify the last person to use the robot.

  Ada started the search program.

  The computer emitted a couple of beeps. She had fallen asleep in her seat. Ada opened her eyes. The search program must have finished. It hadn’t been able to reconstruct any data. But it had found something.

  “Valja, look at this.”

  Valja sat down next to her.

  “Looks pretty,” she said.

  The screen showed a pattern of colored points that formed interesting swirls.

  “That’s the residual data of the last user,” Ada explained. “A flat projection of the three-dimensional memory banks used by the consciousness that was in the robot.”

  “And what does it tell us?”

  Ada pointed to Valentina’s bed, which had a blanket spread over it. There was an indent in the blanket. “You’ve left a pattern on your bed, which allows us to draw conclusions about your shape. We can recognize arms, legs and head. It’s almost like a fingerprint.”

  “So the residual data is something like a fingerprint of the consciousness?”

  “Not entirely, but almost. It’s like your bed. If you’d been lying on a metallic foil, or on a rubber sheet, your impression would look different in each case.”

  “Then won’t get us anywhere. I don’t suppose there’s a database of typical consciousness memory patterns?”

  “Of course not. That’s private. We need to find another structure, as similar as possible, to compare it to.”

  “Zhenyi’s robot,” said Valja. “You want to check that!”

  Valentina was clever. Ada was proud of her, because she herself had only just thought of the fact that Zhenyi had been forced to leave her robot body behind when she escaped from their ship. The models must be almost identical. They should be able to work out quickly whether Zhenyi’s consciousness had been in both robots.

  “Come on, let’s get it out of storage and have a look,” said Ada.

  The computer beeped again. This time Ada wasn’t asleep, and Valja was already sitting next to her and holding her lower left hand.

  Ada operated the computer with her other three hands. Two patterns of dots appeared side-by-side on the screen. Ada laid one over the other. If they had been too different, then nothing would be recognizable. But the picture remained astonishingly sharp.

  “It was her,” said Valentina.

  “That’s obvious. But why? What happened here?”

  It was truly mysterious.

  “Either Zhenyi kept switching back and forth between the robots and her biological body,” said Valja, “or her consciousness was doubled, which isn’t possible.”

  “She didn’t switch. She even told us, but I didn’t believe her,” said Ada.

  “The Aterae, these beings made of dark energy, that duplicated Zhenyi and Kepler?”

  “If that’s possible within the bounds of physics.”

  “But then shouldn’t Kepler also have had a double on the ship?” asked Valja.

  “One moment. We found Zhenyi on the Gigadyson. Then she escaped via laser pulse, and it was to the coordinates where we found the ship. Their doubles were waiting for them there. Then we came with our flotilla. Their doubles subsequently let us kill them, and Zhenyi escaped again. I had a look at the transmitter log. Before the battle a laser pulse was sent out.”

  “But that doesn’t account for Kepler,” said Valja.

  “Maybe he had a crisis of conscience and withdrew.”

  “Or he had another role to play.”

  “You may be right... I did wonder why they waited for us here. They could have fled! We’d never have caught up with the ninety-niner. So there must have been a reason for them to stay here. What if they had been waiting up to the last minute for Kepler? His mission must be especially important.”

  “But Kepler obviously didn’t come, and then it was too late.”

  “The two doubles sacrificed themselves so Zhenyi could escape.”

  “That could be what happened, Ada. But what evidence do we have? The coordinates of Zhenyi’s escape and the fact that a robot was on board the enemy ship. That’s not much to go on.”

  Valja was right. It wasn’t proof. They just had clues, which they’d have to follow.

  “That leaves us with only one option,” said Ada. “We have to fly to the coordinates Zhenyi last escaped to. Presumably that’s where the finale of this drama will play out.”

  Cycle IP 6.1, Gigadyson

  Zhenyi was getting worried. She hadn’t heard anything from Z and K. Had their plan worked and bought her a little time? Even in the worst case, if their ruse had been discovered immediately, the flotilla would still need longer than it had taken her via laser pulse. Taking into account accelerating and braking maneuvers, she should have at least four weeks to implement the plan. She had actually hoped Kepler would already be at the control station to meet her. She’d given the butler the coordinates and asked him to pass them on to Kepler. But she was still alone, and it was impossible to make any predictions.

  She hoped Z and K hadn’t died for nothing. They had started to feel like more than mere doubles to her. That was probably normal when people lead their own lives. Even beings that started out as almost identical copies would emancipate themselves quite quickly from their originals. The Aterae had made sure their bodies wouldn’t feel any pain when the time came. Their consciousnesses were supposed to have been transmitted back to the gravastar by a method that was only possible for Aterae.

  Zhenyi still would have liked to hear from them, something like, “Hello, we’re fine, have a good time.” But she would have to make do without that. She had to go on, living with the doubt. What if the others were right after all? Was she a traitor to humanity—or their savior?

  If only Kepler had come back. She didn’t know anyone easier to talk to about such things.

  Cycle IP 6.8, Gigadyson

  There was no alternative. She had to execute the last phase. The long-range scanners at the control station reported a swarm of ships approaching. So, Ada and Valja had obviously found her. But without the precise data that the Arbiter’s were supposed to calculate, this was going to be a shot in the dark. Maybe humanity would be lucky and the flood of dark energy would be successfully interrupted. Of course, it was also possible that she would be destroying the Gigadyson in vain.

  Was it even conscionable, under these circumstances, to initiate the process? The chance that a random blast would hit its target was pretty slim. No, it was probably irresponsible, based on such a vague possibility, to take away the energy source that was intended to supply humanity for the next million years. She didn’t want to be alone in making so critical a decision for the future of humanity. Man, Kepler! Please come back, even if you’ve been unsuccessful, she thought.

  Zhenyi left the station and climbed on
to the roof. There was already a shuttle waiting there in the darkness of space. She switched on her flashlight and surveyed it. It had the round platform and the curtain. Z and K had obviously prepared everything. All she needed to do was fly to the coordinates, which she already knew, and then remove the material there at just the right moment. Right now, the Gigadyson was like a gigantic egg balanced on its end. One last, little push would tip it over. Then there would be no stopping it.

  The tiny imbalance would escalate until the shell could no longer withstand the vibrations and would burst open at the pre-determined time and place. The Gigadyson’s energy would spill out into the surrounding area in a torrent. It would spray out as though from a crack in a dam. It would bridge massive distances and destroy the channels through which the dark energy would otherwise have poured into their galaxy.

  Previously, on Terra, they had fought fire with fire. She would fight flood with flood.

  If only Kepler were standing by her side.

  Cycle IP 7.1, Gigadyson

  “It’s a basic control station,” said Valja. “It’s not even equipped with weapons. And we’re flying toward it with eighty-nine ships, as though we’re dealing with a dangerous enemy?”

  “I’m not going to underestimate Zhenyi again. We stick to the plan of surrounding the station and arresting Zhenyi.”

  “That worked well last time.”

  Ada was pacing up and down. Valja was right to object. If Zhenyi didn’t want to be arrested, then they’d have a problem. But this time she had no way of provoking a firefight, and if she tried to escape in a shuttle, they’d have a better chance of catching her with a large flotilla.

  “Maybe she’s sitting in a shuttle,” Ada suggested, “in which case it makes sense to have a large flotilla on her tail. When do we arrive at the station?”