Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  Bruno is regarded as a genius, but alas it doesn't take one to see that he's not going to get away. The remaining attackers have divided their forces democratically, so that three are bearing down on Conrad Mursk and two on Bruno de Towaji, and both teams are more than enough to accomplish the job. This is not at all according to plan, so he throws the second glue bomb, runs some more in jackrabbit zigzags, and then turns, breathing heavily, to stand his ground.

  If those black boxes, those brain annexes, are vulnerable to bullets, then perhaps a good bashing can also provide them with an educational reprogramming. Or perhaps not, but even after all this time Bruno is not inclined to die in retreat with a wound in his back when he can instead die bravely, with a wound in his belly. It makes a better end of things, yes?

  And this behavior seems to puzzle the robots, or at least to give them pause. They are not afraid of him, but neither can their mission be accomplished optimally if they themselves are killed, so it behooves them to assess every threat. And he has already surprised them twice, which ought to make them cautious. Ought to.

  But as he prepares to make his final stand, and die at last, the air is split by a shrill noise—several of them, actually—sounding for all the world like the tin police whistles Bruno still remembers from his youth in Girona, among the Catalan hills of Old Earth. Before it was known as Murdered Earth.

  And then there are faint shimmers in the air around him, and strange sourceless shadows whirling on the ground. And the robots are startled, as if reacting to some new threat, and in another moment they're breaking and bursting and dying at Bruno's feet, and Radmer's.

  The last of them, before it collapses, puts its arms above its head in a mockery of surrender, and then shoots its fingertips upward on slender, gleaming rods. Radio antennae, clearly: an attempt to report back its status or to call in reinforcements. But the rods are sliced away by some invisible force, and then the shadows on the ground draw nearer and wilder, and the robot falls away in a bursting of bright orange fire, leaving Bruno and Radmer alone in a field of fragments.

  But there are shadows all around, like heat ripples on the floor of a desert, and seeing them approach, Bruno collapses in undignified confusion, holding an arm above him. And one of the shadows draws nearer, and then something passes between Bruno and the sun. Only then, in silhouette, can he finally see the source of one shadow: a dim human shape, swathed in stealth fabric and painted with the glowing colors of earth and sky. In broad daylight its power consumption must be considerable. Hence the shadows: the fabric is bright enough to mimic the light waves passing through it from ground and sky, but cannot quite match the intensity of the sun itself.

  In another moment the faint shimmers in the air begin, one by one, to flicker and darken and assume human shape. These are ordinary human beings, in very high-quality stealthsuit camouflage. Or rather, very old, very unordinary human beings, like Bruno and Radmer, with frizzy, yellow-white hair and sagging skin and worn, polished nubs for teeth.

  A few of them glance incuriously at Bruno, now ruefully picking himself up, but their attention, for the most part, is focused on Radmer. There are five of them altogether, and they surround him with guns and swords raised in a kind of salute. Either that, or this is some bizarre ritual presaging his capture or murder. But no, there's too much smiling for that. Soon, Radmer is thumping these men on the back, whooping and laughing. “I've had closer calls, but not many! My thanks to you, Sidney Lyman. Your arrival is most timely.”

  “We hoped it was you, sir,” says Lyman, apparently the leader of these five rescuers. “We saw something coming down out of the sky, which fit with the rumors we'd heard about a weird project going on at Highrock. But these lot”—he kicks at a pile of robot shards—“saw you come down as well, and when our picket sensors found them headed in this direction, I felt the need to call muster and bring at least a small piece of the old unit together. And here I see it was the right decision. Unless you've changed sides, ha!” Then, more seriously: “How you been, sir?”

  “How do you think?” Conrad asks, laughing grimly. “For the likes of us, as for the morbid humans, there's no safe place in the world anymore. And that's if you're inclined to hide, which I, alas, am not.”

  The other man, Lyman, seems to take this as a rebuke. He says, “The Echo Valley hideout is necessary, and may yet save your skin. I know it saved mine, more than once, and every man here will tell you the same. Even this enemy”—he kicks once again at the heaps of silicon shards—“hasn't seen through the stealth veils yet. Some of us still have children growing up, sir, as crazy as that sounds. We do require some security, if only for them.”

  “I'm not angry,” Conrad assures him. “I'm not arguing with you. Believe me, I am very glad to see you at this moment.”

  Lyman smiles and hugs his old friend—his old leader, apparently—once again. Then he says, “They told us you'd gone to space, in search of some item of great strategic value. Did you find it?”

  “Aye, and nearly lost it.” Radmer nods toward Bruno. “This man is . . . its keeper, I suppose you would say. His life must be defended at all costs, or all of ours may be forfeit. Even in your damned valley.”

  Here, Lyman looks critically at Bruno for the first time, and does a sort of double take. “Sir, you look awfully familiar. Have we met?”

  Bruno sees no point in concealing his identity, but neither does he feel a need to announce it. He isn't a king anymore, just as Conrad Mursk is not an architect, although his claimed lack of generalship seems rather in doubt at this point. What Bruno says is, “Not to my knowledge, lad, though anything is possible. Or used to be, anyway.”

  Lyman seems to find this funny, as do two of his men. “How are we to call you?” he asks when the chuckling has subsided.

  Bruno thinks about it for a moment before answering, “Ako'i.” This is the Tongan word for “teacher,” or colloquially a kind of friendly insult—someone smarter than those around him, and therefore poor company. It is a name by which Bruno was addressed off and on for years at Tamra's court, before his own ascendancy to the throne. When they should have been calling him “Declarant.”

  And then it is Bruno's turn to ask questions, for he'd noticed as Lyman sheathed his sword—a sort of epee or fencing foil just over a meter in length—that it had a hilt and a wickedly sharp tip, but no middle. Indeed, the tip seems to hover in the air, to dance, to track the rotations and translations of the hilt. It behaves as if attached, and yet Lyman had put his hand right through the thing, right through the empty space between hilt and tip!

  “That sword,” Bruno says. “Small gods, I've seen nothing like it in . . . in . . .” He doesn't know how long.

  Seeing his face, Lyman pulls the sword once more from its slim leather scabbard, and passes a hand again through the empty space that is its blade. “This, Ako'i, is one of the old air foils. A stabbing weapon, real difficult to parry.”

  “Indeed!” Bruno exclaims. “An interesting use of the technology. There are others like it, then?”

  “A few,” Lyman says with a shrug. “Here and there. We hang onto them, of course, for their monetary value if nothing else. Whole kingdoms have traded hands in exchange for one. But it's a dueler's dream, almost a guaranteed kill. And more importantlike, it's a fine weapon to baffle these mirror-plated scullery maids. They've yet to work out any defense. Just jab, jab, jab 'em in the box, in the eyes, in the joints, and down they go. Almost as good as a blitterstaff. Would you like to hold it?”

  “Later, if you please,” Radmer interjects. “I must get this man to Timoch as soon as possible.”

  Lyman turns back to him, looking puzzled and disappointed. “You're not coming with us? We could be under the veils in three hours. Nell has a pot of stew cooking and everything.”

  The ghost of a smile flickers across Radmer's face and then vanishes. “That sounds wonderful, Lyman. Really. But my mission is more urgent than you seem to imagine. In fact, to the extent that I still co
mmand any loyalty, I'll request that you and your men accompany us as far as the city gates.”

  “Really! As far as that?” Lyman asks, cynically amused. “And when they skin us alive as bandits, what would you give us in return? We have, if you recall, just saved your life.”

  At that Radmer really does smile, looking for once like the Conrad Mursk that Bruno remembers. “My friend, you may have saved more than that. History will be the judge, not I, but I suspect you've just saved the world.”

  And so he has, in a manner of speaking, though it will bring as much sorrow as joy. But that, alas, is another tale altogether.

  appendix A

  in which an appendix is provided

  engineering issues

  On the subject of his engines, Money Izolo waxed loquacious. “Deutrelium burns clean, sir—only charged particles are produced, so we can steer them out the back with electric fields. Meaning there's no radiation hazard to the crew, in theory. But there's impurities, yah? Teeny little bits of the ship that get mixed in with the fuel slurry. These cause side reactions, releasing stuff like high-energy neutrinos, which convert some fraction of the electrons in the exhaust plasma into pions, which are harder to stop. That's a problem, a danger, that never goes away. I could use a whole person full-time, just monitoring the pion flux.”

  Conrad smirked. “A true pioneer, eh?”

  But Money missed the pun and just looked at him blankly for a moment before continuing. “When we're nonpropulsive, the demands on the reactor will be a lot less, and a lot steadier. Lighting, heating, life support . . . Those are predictable loads. Still, data processing can take a lot of power when the hypercomputers get large enough. Working on a tough problem they can fill this whole wall, with the heat sinks glowing red from dissipated information, which is the same thing as heat. And we expend about one hundred watts continuously on waste management, mostly dust.”

  Conrad's eyebrow went up. “Dust?”

  “Yah, there are mechanical parts on this ship: fans, bearings, hinges, and seals. Stuff like that. It's all subject to mechanical wear. And the stuff that rubs off winds up mostly in the atmosphere, as a nanoparticle smog which settles out on surfaces. And to the extent that we have people onboard, out of fax storage, there are always shed skin cells, and hair, and what have you. People shed an incredible amount of mass over the course of a month. Almost half a kilogram per person, which is more than the weight of your hand. Yah, I know, it's disgusting.

  “Anyways, the wellstone bucket-brigades that stuff to the nearest fax machine for disposal, but it takes a certain amount of energy and computing to do that, see? And inside the fax there's a sorting penalty. We're fighting entropy itself. To turn a kilogram of dust into a kilogram of buffer mass sorted by atomic number, you need as much energy as you'd get from burning a thousand birthday candles. On a planet, that process happens naturally, powered by sunlight, and the fact that it's wickedly inefficient doesn't matter. But here it's a part of our daily maintenance. Like holding back the tide with a mop.”

  “I thought entropy always increased.”

  “It does, yah. All you can do is push it off somewheres else. With enough energy, you can reduce it locally, but there's a larger increase in the rest of the universe. It has to be that way, right? Or else life and machinery wouldn't be possible at all. But entropy is the great bill collector; it always catches up, oozing around every barrier. It'll find us in the end.”

  “How comforting.”

  “Isn't it? And then there's the occasional juking maneuver—we'll be in Sol's Oort cloud for another thirty years, and later on we'll be in Barnard's for ten. Juking takes energy, and requires a minimum reactor temperature. But yah, I think most of that can be handled automatically.”

  Conrad ran his hand along the wall, feeling the flat, smooth texture of the wellstone. He tried to imagine the electrical potentials in there, dancing as oversized pseudoatoms flexed their orbital “arms” to pass a dust grain along. “That's interesting about the sorting penalty,” he said. “I've never heard anything like that before.”

  Return to text. astrogation issues

  Said Robert M'Chunu on the subject of getting lost: “You remember the term ‘drunkard's walk'?”

  “No,” Conrad answered.

  “Really? I thought you were one of the navigators on Viridity. Drunkard's walk is where you get random, quantum-level noise on a rate sensor. This is inevitable; no sensor is free of it. So you've got multiple rate sensors, each with its own random noise. This is fortunately very small, but you add up your rates over time to get your orientation, and suddenly you're accumulating and then squaring those errors. So they grow exponentially. If we let ours drift for six months, then the orientation we compute is complete gibberish. Six months is a long time for a planetary voyage. A really long time. But out here, it's nothing.

  “Our Cartesian location—the XYZ of it—is even worse, because there you're integrating from acceleration to velocity to position, which cubes your errors. Of course you can always get a fixed reference for orientation, from the stars themselves. There are bright ones, distant ones, with close to zero proper motion. They're fixed against the sky, even though we're moving very fast. Those make excellent references, and they keep our attitude numbers sane. Downrange velocity we can get from the reference pulsars, which are neutron stars with very precisely known rotation rates. They flash like beacons, and we can measure the Doppler shift to obtain a fairly accurate velocity.

  “But cross-range, perpendicular to our direction of travel, our references are poorer, and our precision is a lot lower. Just about the only lateral references we have are Sol and Barnard themselves. We're running a straight-line course between them, so their proper motion should be zero. They shouldn't drift against the background stars, not at all. So we look for very tiny motions, and compensate when we see them. But even on a good day that leaves us with velocity errors of walking speed or higher. And those errors are integrated to get position. You see the problem? Garbage in, garbage-cubed out. That's navigation for you.”

  Return to text. pressing problems

  “Pressing neubles isn't so easy,” Money said to Conrad against the backdrop of the hypermass. “If you just wrapped a blob of neutronium in an ordinary diamond, you'd get an explosion. The sad truth of it is, those neutrons would slip right through the diamond lattice, because there's nothing to hold them in. Pull this mass away from the black hole and you'd have the same problem: no confinement.”

  “Well how do you make a neuble then?” Conrad objected. He had seen it done. He'd seen a neuble with his own two eyes: a two-centimeter sphere of diamond with . . . something inside. The color was difficult to describe: somewhere between light gray and mother-of-pearl and shiny silver superreflector.

  Money chuckled. “It's one of those things, sir, that seem really simple until you try 'em. At the kind of pressures we can achieve industrially, we get only slightly past the drip line, which is the point where the neutrons start to condense. Where the electrons and protons are squeezed into neutrons, you see? They don't want to lose their identity that way. They fight it.

  “I don't know about a neutron star or anything, but the neutronium we make is only about fifty percent neutrons by mass. Mixed in with that you've got superfluid protons and ordinary conduction electrons moving close to lightspeed, which is equivalent to a very, very high temperature. They want to fly energetically off into space, yah? This creates a phenomenal outward pressure, over and above the density of the neutronium itself. So the first thing you've got to do is pull the electrons out, and isolate them from the protons with a superinsulator.”

  “Which diamond is not,” Conrad said. Because he did know some things about the behavior of materials.

  “Which diamond is not, right. Actually, the insulator isn't a physical substance at all, or not precisely one. It's more like a quantum state which forbids the electrons from being on the other side of the barrier. Anyway, once you've got protons and
neutrons on the inside, and relativistic electrons whizzing around on the outside, you've got what amounts to a gigantic atom. But it's unstable, yah? The attraction between the protons and electrons has a tendency to hold the thing together, but it's powers of ten weaker than the outward pressure of all those neutrons, which desperately want to fly apart. It's the mother of all atomic nuclei, and large nuclei are always unstable.”

  “Meaning what?” Conrad asked. “That neubles can't exist? You're not making sense, Money.”

  “Oh, they can exist, all right. But they've got to be a particular size. An atom is just a really small piece of neutronium, yah? Most potential atoms don't exist in the real universe, because they'd be unstable. Too big, too squishy. But stability islands occur all up and down the periodic table, and there's a strong one centered on atomic number 1038. That's a billion-ton atom, you see, and its mass equates to the Schwarzchild radius of a proton-sized black hole, which is a magic number. Gravitic engineering is full of numbers like that. Anyway, ‘stability island' is a relative term, because the thing still wants to decompose in a couple of picoseconds. It still wants to explode. But we've brought the pressures down into the realm that diamond can withstand. That's how a neuble is made.”

  Return to text.

  appendix B

  glossary

  Aft —(adj or adv) One of the ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.

  AKA —(abbrev) Also Known As

  Antiautomata —(adj) Describes any weapon intended for use against robots.

  Apenine —(prop n) Province of the Luner nation of Imbria which includes the capital city of Timoch.