This updated version includes the bonus short Last Stand. It was tempting when writing Signal Loss to follow Kyan aboard the Resolve and see what he found, but that story ended in the right place. Last Stand follows up on Kyan's story and also gives us a little more of Watts's origin.
In Signal Loss, I wanted to write about an isolated ordinary person caught up in an extraordinary situation. It’s easy for authors to write heroes who have special backgrounds that enable them to defeat the bad guys, but I think it’s more interesting to have an average dad who just wants to get back home using only his wits and experience to stay alive.
When I wrote 43 Seconds, it occurred to me the ship technology in the story could be a terrible weapon. The idea of relativistic weapons isn’t new in sci-fi, but I’m surprised it doesn’t appear more often. It’s a natural consequence of the great speeds required for space travel. If the kinetic impactor in Signal Loss were allowed to complete its 86 AU flight, it would achieve 3.7% light speed, resulting in a 37 megaton explosion if it hit something. Modern nuclear weapons max out at a little more than 1 megaton.
One of the other problems in the story is signal loss due to the Earth passing behind the Sun. This is a current real life problem with Mars, which passes behind the Sun every 26 months resulting in a 2 week communications blackout with the rovers and orbiters. The last Mars signal loss was June 7 - 21, 2015.
The planetary stack up which gives the Aristarchus some quiet will happen in 2080, just like the story describes. No need to wait until then to see a greater conjunction (where Saturn and Jupiter overlap when viewed from Earth). They happen every twenty years, and the next one is December 21, 2020.
Thanks again, and keep dreaming big.
The Science of the Story
It turns out that the end of the solar system is remarkably far away. Growing up, I thought Pluto was the end, but at 30-49 AU that’s not even half way there. In 2012, Voyager 1 reached the actual end of the solar system (the heliopause) at 121 AU. It’s the actual end because it’s the place where the pressure of the solar wind is cancelled by the pressure of the interstellar medium. In other words, it’s where you’ve left the last tendrils of our solar system’s influence and gone fully interstellar. In Signal Loss, the Aristarchus is somewhere between Pluto and the heliopause, at 86 AU. This distance is so far that, even at light speed, Kyan’s conversations with his daughter have a full twenty-four hour turn-around. Just as an aside, I think it's amazing that there's a real life spaceship that is much farther than the Aristarchus. Voyager 1 is nearly an entire Sun to Pluto distance past Kyan's location.
Sedna and Eris are minor planets at the outer edges of the solar system, similar in size to Pluto. Sedna has a huge orbit with an aphelion (maximum distance from the Sun) of 936 AU, taking 11,000 years to complete one orbit. It’s interesting that I grew up thinking our solar system had nine planets, then Pluto was downgraded, making eight, and now we’ve found more Plutos. Noodle on the fact that some of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons (Titan and Ganymede) are larger than actual planets (Mercury), then try to answer the question how many planets are in our solar system?
Although signal loss was inevitable from Kyan’s position, solar flares accelerated it. Solar flares are classed A, B, C, M or X. The most powerful flare ever observed was the Carrington Event in 1859, and is estimated to be an X45 class, causing telegraphs to spark and generating worldwide auroras bright enough to read newspapers.
Things smashing into other things is another key element in Signal Loss. Kinetic energy is the energy of moving things. The equation (for things not traveling near light speed) is simple: one-half of the object’s mass times its velocity squared. Small things going very fast can be very damaging to large things. NASA gets credit for using this concept to smash asteroids. It’s not fiction at all: in 2005 NASA’s Deep Impact impactor intentionally slammed into comet Tempel 1, although it was for the purpose of ejecting material from the nucleus to analyze the comet’s interior. NASA’s 370 kg impactor was similar in mass and shape to the 500 kg drones used in Signal Loss, although Kyan’s drone was traveling 0.1% of light speed when it collided with Watts’s weapon.
To imagine what a 0.1% light speed collision is like, imagine getting into your car, stepping on the gas, and accelerating to nearly half-a-million miles per hour. Ignore the fact that the gee forces will liquify you just before the atmosphere at your car’s nose compresses into a plasma ball and incinerates you like a meteor. Aside from that, you’ll exceed escape velocity and blast straight off the surface of the Earth into space. If you’re amazingly unlucky and the moon happens to be in your flight path, then you will enjoy a leisurely thirty-minute trip before collision. Make sure your windows are rolled up. Your car stereo isn’t going to pick up terrestrial radio, so hopefully your phone has some good music. I recommend Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” At the conclusion of your Earth-Moon transit, you impact the Moon thirty times faster than a typical asteroid. Your kinetic energy converts into a 7 kiloton explosion. This will certainly eject some of the Moon’s surface back into space, and some of those meteorites may rain back to Earth as shooting stars. Way to go, speedy.
One of the other themes explored in Signal Loss is machine intelligence. Although Rios sounds intelligent right from the start of the story, consider the fact that non-intelligent computers have been fooling people for some time. MIT’s Eliza program, created in 1964, fooled people into thinking they were talking to a psychotherapist. That’s right, nearly twenty years before you were sitting crossed-legged in front of your tv playing Circus Atari, people were chatting with computers via text interface. You can try it yourself online. In 2014, the Eugene Goostman program was the first to (debatably) pass the Turing Test. The general Turing standard is: if you can't tell the difference between a computer and person, the computer is sentient. I think as expert systems become more competent and convincing, this definition will need to change. Clearly the Eugene Goostman program is not sentient (if you read any chat logs from his conversations, he seems similar to the 1964 Eliza program).
Signal Loss also suggests that sentience enables decision-making which conflicts with programming. In 1942, Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics. They are:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Seconds Law
Assuming Rios is programmed with similar laws, you can see the pickle he’s in when he must choose between doing nothing (allowing Kyan and himself to die) or opening the fabmod pressure door (killing Watts). Law 1 alone is enough to spin him into an endless logic loop, but throw in an order from Kyan (Law 2) and his own demise (Law 3), and you’ve got a real conundrum.
And yes, “Rios, open the fabmod pressure door" was a nod to the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey line, "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." It seems humanity is destined to argue with A.I.s about opening airlock doors.
Thanks again for reading Signal Loss!
1
Breathe
Jia’s stomach burns and she jolts awake. She flails against the suffocation as if she can beat it away with her own two hands. Tears well in a weightless film across her eyelids and she scrubs the back of one hand across her face while the other fumbles with the harness release. Her head throbs. When she sets her hand to the site of the pain, it returns sticky and red. Thoughts spark and fizzle in an overlapping jumble of competing primal urges. Air. She needs air.
Stop. Right side, right side. Her right hand slides down, finds the emergency kit. The breather feels cool against her palm, then she has it, bites down like a scuba diver, and there’s a hiss as liquid O2 expands. The first breath hurts her chest like winter air, but it’s a sweet pain and she closes her eyes for a moment to just breathe. It’s like a drug,
electric, hyper-sensitizing. Neurons fire through the haze. She blinks and assesses the room.
Emergency lights trace psychedelic patterns in the zero gee drifting smoke. Bits and pieces of chair foam, loose fasteners, and pieces of soot coast by. Each casts a long, moving shadow, a dark tail like an inverse comet. Ethereal amber light shifts with scrolling alerts.
She inhales deeply from the breather, pops it out of her mouth. “Ship?”
No response.
“Ping? Are you there? Ping, respond.”
An explosion somewhere and her head whiplashes. She keys icons for damage assessment.
Battery three is gone, fire suppression is depleted. Engines are offline. There’s damage everywhere. It’s her fault.
Ping. Her friend Ping was down there.
She’s about to unclick her harness and stand when a pulsing red smudge catches her eye. She wipes the fire suppression snowfall and her finger shakes. Orbital diagrams spin on the display. Uranus is an infinite sky stretching in a plane parallel to the ship. The Prosperity plows through the upper atmosphere.
Her stomach drops. She tries to send power from the remaining batteries to the shredded engines, but there is no response. Her pulse races and a clawing digs within her chest, then she remembers the breather, bites down, takes several breaths, pops it back out and opens the emergency channel. Nothing. She slams her fist down on the workstation. Think.
Ping.
She’s out of the chair and diving down the transit tube. The wind picks up mid-tube, whistling, and she looks over to the comms room. Scorch marks stain the pressure seal and a dozen holes make the metal look moth-eaten. Blue sunlight shafts connect the trajectories of each hole with a matching breach on the far wall. Her ears and eyes hurt.
She descends deeper until she comes to the core junction. To the starboard, the emergency area beckons, a fully self-sufficient life pod with its own RF drive, food, water, air and medicine. Get Ping, get inside, jettison it, climb to a stable orbit and activate the beacon. Rescue in twelve days.
Jia ignores it and descends to the aft door. She hooks on a rung, stretches, and keys in the override. Red lights strobe and the seal flashes open, then she’s fighting against the wind as she climbs down the ladder head first. When the door slides down she takes the breather out of her mouth and gulps atmosphere. It tastes bitter, acrid, like burning plastic.
The hangar houses two aerostats shaped like giant Apollo-era capsules. The first is fully extended on its tracks at the edge of the hangar door. A large red number one is printed on its nose. Ping is not here at aerocon, but a slate drifts by and Jia grabs it, tucks it into her belt, then watches the pattern of drifting debris to find an opening before pushing off towards the next room.
Extravehicular Prep. The air here smells strongly of solvent and tickles her throat. Ping is here drifting helmetless in a red spacesuit. Jia kicks off the entrance and collides with him. She takes the breather from her mouth and works it into his. “I got you, Ping.”
The slate recommends airway anti-spasmodics, increased suit oxygen, drugs to counter the volatiles from the battery fire, and inhaled nano-cellular therapy. Some of that is here at the emergency EV station and she presses an injector to his neck. She takes the breather back, places her hand on his cheek, then snaps his helmet on.
Several red EV and blue PLEX suits are here. She slips into the red suit nearest Ping and the slate’s display fizzes over her faceplate as she tethers to his suit’s carabiner. “Okay, we’re getting out of here.”
Something huge rips off the Prosperity and crashes into the starboard hull. Jia can’t tell if she is spinning or if the room is turning around her. She reaches out, curls her fingers around Ping’s chest handle and pulls him into an embrace. Her back bounces off the ceiling.
“Jia?” Ping asks, eyes half parted. “Tried to…tried to get to you. Fire in the battery room.”
“Ping! Hey, stay with me. We’re getting off the ship.”
Jia pushes off the ceiling and navigates Ping back to the core junction. A blast of air and they’re through the door, but her eyes are dark adjusted and the hall is filled with intense light. She hooks a rung and they pendulate for a moment.
The junction is different. Chaotic bursts of yellow firelight spear through the comms door holes and a dazzling shaft of aquamarine carves a luminous corridor bisecting the hall. Sunlight reflected off Uranus.
Jia’s voice cracks. “No!”
She pulls Ping up to the lifepod window, squints and peers inside. There should be the welcoming glow of the lifepod’s interior lights through the airlock, but instead there is no lifepod, no airlock, just ripped, bent metal splayed open like a flower. As she watches, more pieces of the umbilical twist, snap and streak away awash in flames.
“That is not good,” Ping says, coughing.
Jia wants to cry. She puts both hands on Ping’s faceplate, tilts her head forward and makes contact with his.
“How long?” asks Ping.
Her response is nearly a whisper. “Minutes.”
“Have an idea.” Another cough. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Ping?”
“Back down, back down, to the hangar.”
She searches his face and her brow tightens. “Oh.” She shakes her head. “Oh, no.”
“Yeah, yeah. We can make it.”
Jia grabs Ping’s suit handle and they emerge from the hangar ceiling. Flames flash in sparking globes from EV Prep.
“Needs to be Aero One,” Ping says. “It’s all set up.”
She brings them down right beside the red number one on the aerostat’s nose. The screen illuminates and Jia pairs her slate to it. Startup icons scroll by. A whine of servos and the capsule’s middle unfurls like a metal blossom.
They slip inside. It’s tight in here, designed for maintenance access only. Sitting cross-legged she taps the slate and the six panels seal them in. Ping’s face is lit underneath by his helmet and her own glow spills warm light on his suit.
“I’m going to try and equalize the bay,” she says.
The klaxon sounds before the air hisses away. Jia taps another icon and the bay doors slide open.
Ping reaches up with both hands and anchors on the steel framework.
She eyes his hands, reads his expression. “Ready?”
“Not really, but, yeah.”
Aero One lurches and rumbles as the track extends outside the door. It’s a four-thousand-kilometer drop underneath them and the sound of open atmosphere buffets the capsule’s bottom. She reads off her helmet HUD. “Here we go. Five, four, three, brace, brace.”
The clamps disengage and the thrusters fire with an ear-numbing blast. Her teeth clatter from the vibrations of the shimmying walls.
Ping looks at her and she hears his rapid breaths over the comm. He nods. They are free, free of the dying ship and flying and falling, both at once.
She remembers the slate and pulls it out, linking into the aerostat’s externals. Ping leans forward as she shares the screen with him.
In the aft camera, a gossamer ring bisects the sky, icy white against a powder gradient fading to ultraviolet. A few pale stars dapple the top of the screen. The Prosperity falls behind them. It sputters and flickers, a great blinding meteor in a cyan haze. Sparks shred off the front and veer away like missiles, each tracing its own path.
Tears well in Jia’s eyes as the fireball divides, splits again, until all that remains of the Prosperity is a rain of fire in a cloudless sky.
2
Descent
Jia is in the capsule, but she is not.
She is falling, but slowing, shedding orbital velocities in a riot of plasma and flame beneath the capsule’s heat shield. She’s slid flat on the floor to distribute her weight against the gee load. When she looks over at Ping, she sees him sitting back on the bridge of the Prosperity.
She remembers him saying, “Did you know that Uranus is the only planet not named after a Roman god?” He was at
station one, sifting through aerostat telemetry.
“We’re losing a hundred thousand an hour that aerostat’s down,” she says.
“Yeah, yeah. But did you know that?”
Her screen is tagged with aerostat locations, twenty-four icons spanning a twelve-thousand-kilometer ellipse straddling the twenty-degree latitude line in Uranus’s atmosphere. After last month’s visit the Hephaestus reported yields were off, and diagnostics suspected Aero Twelve was failing. All attempts to repair Aero Twelve remotely were unsuccessful, so here they are, interplanetary tech support.
She gives Ping a sidelong glance. “You’re wrong, you know.”
He looks up from his work, smiles. “Eh, how’s that?”
“There’s one other planet not named after a Roman god.”
Ping looks up, starts ticking names on his fingers. “Not counting minor planets, right?”
“It’s also blue.” She pretends not to look at him, taps at her display. “Kind of noisy.”
“Ah!” He points an index finger. “Good one.”
She likes Ping’s bits of trivia, his wit, and she catches herself watching him work sometimes. In her travels, she’s probably spent more time with him than anyone else.
The red aerostat icon blinks yellow on her screen. “Hey, I managed to get Twelve to talk with me. It’s spouting gibberish, though. Plus, it’s drifted five thousand clicks out of the loop. If it goes any farther north, it’ll get torn apart by winds.”
“Too bad it’s not responding to recall orders. It’s been a while since I’ve done a telepresence repair. I was kind of looking forward to it.” He shrugs. “Guess we’ll have to drop a new one.”
She doesn’t know why this moment sticks in her mind. Maybe it was just the last bit of normalcy she remembers.
Back in Aero One, Ping gives her a sidelong glance and returns her to the present. “You okay?”
Hayden's World Shorts, Stories 1-3: 43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One Page 8