I looked up at Mother, more fascinated by her than the panoramic view out of the window.
“Space is boring. These dust and ice balls separated by voids are only interesting if we engineer them, bring them closer to us.”
~~~
She was wrong in a way. Space is terrifying when you’re moving through it at 0.15% of the speed of light. Dust motes have the kinetic energy of an oncoming truck and are only dealt with by our large ablation shield of dirty ice.
We would get used to it and it would become boring if we let it, though.
Instead, we all allow a certain background of panic to make sure we keep our collective edge.
Mother was right in a more important way, though. Traversing the void, as we are doing, is not enough. We have to close it, make it a place in its own right.
~~~
The people around the quadrangle observed my favorite status with the soldiers with dull contempt. The children hated me for a traitor without being able to do anything about it. I was untouchable and even my Aunt and Uncle despised me as they ate the extra rations I got them.
The soldiers took to giving me forbidden gifts. Jeans, sneakers, music patches loaded with the latest thrash from Cleveland, the latest hip-hop from El Paso. My family ate better than any other, I had more sweets than I could eat — but no one would share them with me.
Then came the Events.
~~~
Soon after returning from Mars to Tallinn, Mother and Father began work on projects that, mysteriously to me, somehow dovetailed.
They made and received tenders to and from a multitude of places, generating clouds of financial data that gradually turned red. If they didn’t get this one, even I could tell we’d be on the rocks.
Thankfully it all came through.
“Look son, your Mother does the large-scale drum design, subcontracting everything from biosphere to fabrics. I use her data to come up with an idealized Virtual used, and steadily adapted, during construction.”
Father’s face was animated in the pure white light reflected off the snow outside the window. He always seemed more present when Mother wasn’t there. Mostly, though, he was nondescript with gray eyes, brown hair and features that tended always to a look of resentment.
His gaze kept skipping to a print leaning precariously on top of a bookshelf, one of the only physical objects in his Virtual-infested study. He pointed at the multicolored fungoid towers and said, “It’s called ‘Europe After the Rain.’”
Looking at it seemed to make him sad.
Yet he kept looking at it when he told me, “Everyone has to be involved in a project this big. Russians, Chinese, even the US. The brains behind it are all European, though. You of all people must see how important that is.”
I closed my face to him and walked away.
~~~
I can’t complete my project if we don’t reach our Destination. Now, 3100 years into the journey, it becomes clear we won’t.
We and the ship are too complex to retain integrity in these conditions over these timescales. From the very beginning we have calculated and recalculated the time at which we erode completely away. Gradually, that estimate has fallen from 7500 years after launch, which was comfortably greater than flight time, to 4000 years — 1000 years before our flight completes. We’re left to count on some leap in technology to give us the time, lacking any other realistic hope. Or rather, any hope but one — unlocking the nano.
~~~
As part of their indulgence, the soldiers allowed me onto the central area whenever I wanted as long as no officers were around.
One day, as I stood on the mud at sunrise, I watched a bird fly up fault lines of azure sky and out of sight. I ran to the concrete bunker to tell one of the soldiers, an amateur ornithologist, what I had seen. As I entered the doorway an unbearable heat raked along my back and I saw an impossibly bright light flash in front. I screamed and fell to the ground. A soldier, well-trained reflexes cutting in, slammed shut the heavy bunker door and then rolled me over and over to put out the flames.
As I lay in a corner whimpering and descending into shock, I heard a voice counting off seconds. The longer the gap between flash and shock wave the less force the shock would have when it hit us.
~~~
Mother and Father were several years into the project when I found out what they had done to me.
Two metallic rocks and one dirty snowball were on their slow way to L5 while a disposable skeleton of the ship was being built from materials mass-driven from the moon. Father’s Virtual was hung from it and became a Virtual for those on site.
For fun I had a crude MRI done at a friend’s house. She wanted to be a neurosurgeon and her parent, approving, bought her a cheap, off-the-shelf kit.
The scan showed a lattice of metal threads running through my brain.
“What is it?”
“Let’s find out.” She ran a utility to map the lattice onto a sphere tagged with brain areas and uploaded it.
A comparison with maps available online gave us a result.
“Mathematical reasoning, spatial awareness, intellectual flexibility. And OCD.” She giggled. “They add OCD to everything. It’s like salt.”
I was too shy to ever talk to my parents about it.
~~~
Stoney comes to visit.
Out of deference to my history, he always changes the stars and stripes on his chest to a Starship Unity flag: a circle of twelve gold hands on a royal blue background. A sweet but unnecessary gesture. It’s been a long time after all.
“Either way we die. Eroded or engulfed, we’re doomed,” he says.
“Why take such a dim view of nano unlocking? It’s a short route to our aims.”
“I expected something more — gentle. Something that might leave us walking around in things that at least look like Real bodies.”
“With current technology there’s essentially no difference between Virtual and Real bodies.”
“We’ll be complex computer programs running on blobs of gray goo, somewhere between the stars, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. We won’t be human.”
“Look,” I say, losing patience. “We aren’t human now. We don’t have DNA, we have twists of buckytubes laced with metal ions. Our bones are mostly a ceramic lattice, filled with adapted coral polyps that act as a secondary immune system. We’re already covered inside and out by gray goo and we don’t know exactly what it does beyond tumor busting. So don’t give me any shit about being human.”
We contemplate the starfield on my wallscreen. My cabin is an exact replica of my parents’ cabin on the Jules Verne. Not an act of respect. More one of spite.
“We lose what’s left of our humanity, yes. We gain by becoming places.”
~~~
The voice reached fifteen when the wave of destruction hit us with an unbearable roar and a rain of concrete dust.
I heard one of the soldiers praying and I joined him.
Eventually the wave passed and none of us was buried under rubble.
After seeing to their own. the soldiers cut my clothes off and rolled me onto a precious mat of nano that cleaned, sterilised and attempted to heal my burns.
They put in an IV then turned to their EMP-hardened comms equipment to find out what had happened.
At no point did they look outside, even through their periscope.
The US troops slid easily into their damage control routines, improvisation and planning melding perfectly to get themselves onto the medevac chopper. Amazingly they took me with them.
“Amazingly” because I briefly saw what was outside.
The carbon fiber walls had blown away in the blast leaving an uninterrupted landscape of horror over the already bleak Yorkshire moor.
~~~
When I saw Mother’s designs I was almost awed. Her skills had never before been so apparent.
“Spinning drums along a central axis. Engines at one end, a large micro-gravity
life-dome at the other. The whole capable of surviving 1g axial acceleration during speed-up and slow-down phases and artificial 0.8g rotational acceleration during cruise.”
She glanced at me to make sure I was paying attention.
“This is all basic, given design. I work to fill in gaps.”
We were in her work area, a riot of British stained glass and Russian icons. She herself had ancestry far east of those icon makers, demonstrated in her small stature and gentle Asian features, incongruously topped with a shocking cloud of Auburn hair.
“The drum produces 0.8g , same as at the surface of the Destination. We run triple helices down drums with cabins, storage and recreation off these loops, with different routes between them available. Mystery in familiarity.”
She built upon this mystery, allowing efficiency at all turns, but always in comfortably enigmatic ways. I could see how she would take all this technological sophistication and force it into some deep template we all carry.
Or rather, not force. Both technology and template were based on the same physical substrate after all. Couldn’t they be mapped onto each other? At some level couldn’t a complex neuronal tangle map continuously onto a more direct application of physics.
The answer is no, of course. To map like that, a common symbolic underpinning is required.
~~~
The transformation takes two hours. We all sleep through it, seeming to wake as normal in our normal ship. To my horror it is still fucking cold.
Most of us immediately punch up Real and shift our viewpoint out ten kilometers. Our beautiful dragonfly is now a seething needle of sparkling gray fifty kilometers long. The dome-shaped ablation shield of asteroid ice is being eaten. There’s no longer any need for it.
“Doesn’t feel too bad, does it?” I say to Stoney.
“No. But being a Virtual I could make it feel bad.”
“Do you have to be so negative?”
“Yes. I actually understand that we are really dead.”
We are in a copy of the Jules Verne stateroom, a place my parents hated and which nearly finished their marriage.
It’s warm in here now; I’ve made it that way. Mars is visible out of the window.
“You think the colony is still there?” asks Stoney.
“We haven’t heard from them in centuries. They had a very shallow, unstable ecosystem.”
“I guess they’re gone. I’d like to think the Hellas Sea is there, though.”
He’s avoiding the issue. I stand beside him at the window holding the cold brass railing in un-mittened hands for the first time in millennia.
“We’re all over three thousand years old, Stoney. We’re insane. We play games that last centuries. We devise forms of sexuality like fashions in clothes. We have excess memories scraped from us annually like barnacles from a wooden ship.”
He looks at me, the image of his face distorted in the rail.
“We are now Virtual beings and this could break us like nothing before. Unity doesn’t care about us now. We’re toys. It could populate the Destination using stored templates without us. Better without us, in fact. No demi-gods strolling around fouling things up.”
“So what now?”
I allow the Virtual engines to increase the airship’s velocity. The red desolation outside moves past more swiftly and the background roar becomes louder.
“We carry through the plan, OK?”
“Ninety percent of the crew won’t agree.”
“It’s the only way we’ll survive, even in Virtual. We have 1900 years to go. In our present state we’ll not exist at the end, except as happy little routines in Unity.”
~~~
Burned and burning bodies were everywhere. Most of the living were dying. Some, who had been facing the blast, had no eyes. Many had flesh burned to the bone. There were none of those famous shadows; we had been too far from the blast for such merciful vapourisation. Instead we had a world of meat: some dead, some living; some crispy black, some bubbling red; some cut clean by flying carbon fiber, some with burned ragged holes.
Over it all, over the burned limestone pavement covered in flesh, floated a low moaning from many throats. A ragged song of pain and sadness and rage.
And, amazingly again, the soldiers, who surely knew who I was, didn’t leave me there.
~~~
Ship design and construction carried on through my adolescence and beyond.
My parents worked continuously, handing me over to child-care collective after child-care collective. The requirements shifted with my age and educational level, each set of metrics recorded in a continuously updated document controlled and monitored by Det Norsk Veritas.
I hung out in alleys with friends and smoked bad weed.
I spent a week in Copenhagen on a field trip and smoked good weed. The next day I was introduced to drugs that had an even greater effect on my neurotransmitters. I liked those, and returned to Tallin with some interesting addictions.
DNV noticed this.
~~~
We can’t start the mutiny until we subvert almost every system on the ship. Unity must know what we are doing but is staying out of the way. We can’t harm it, although we may be able to shut it out of certain systems.
The philosophy of the program may be alien to a ship, of all entities, but it is still capable of making jokes about it. Changing the view out of my window one day to a loop of the famous Tacoma Narrows collapse was one.
To achieve our program, though, we first have to understand it.
~~~
The chopper flew us north, and as we flew a small vial of black medical nano was hooked up to the rigid mat of nano fused to my back.
The soldiers said nothing to me and little to each other.
Later I was told what had happened.
A Cumbrian nurse whispered to me of subverted activate codes; of centuries-old US controls on the “Independent Nuclear Deterrent” being bypassed in seconds; of every English nuclear weapon on missiles, bombers and submarines exploding simultaneously.
For reasons never entirely clear, every nuclear power station on the island had been surrounded by nukes.
England was gone; Scotland south of the Highlands and Wales lower than Snowdonia were gone. All despite the Peoples Republic of Scotland and the Welsh DMZ having no nuclear weapons of their own at all.
Ireland and most of the west coast of Continental Europe were left dying under clouds of radioactive dust.
The US blamed the insurgents in Snowdonia in general, and my mum and dad in particular, for the attack.
I was treated with the best care available in a hospital in Russia, a very public symbol of mercy by the US. Meanwhile, Snowdonia was carpet-bombed, the first real attempt to root out what had previously been a convenient and weak adversary.
This was the trigger for the far more terrible Event #2 — indisputably insurgent devised.
~~~
DNV informed my parents who, irritated at being dragged away from designing the garden maze accommodation of Drum #5, dragged me into the house conference room.
“Do not fuck this up. Fail and no space on ship.”
Mum’s hair always seemed to stand on end when she was angry, as though it were carrying an electrical charge. I began to idly calculate how much charge would be required.
“What if I don’t want to go on your stupid ship?”
I knew the answer, of course. I was just being petulant.
“Then you die within 1000 years, along with the rest of us. The ecosystem is becoming shallow. There’s no buffering anymore. When it crashes, anti-senescence drugs will be of no use.”
I knew the obvious arguments. “You go then,” I said.
“I wish we could, son. We’re too old.” As so often, my father got the last, slowly fading word.
~~~
Everyone knows who we are, everyone knows we’re up to something, everyone knows our abilities. We haven’t done anything but conspire, and that’s not currentl
y against the rules in our Nomic-driven legal system.
Still, we’re frozen out of everything important. Those of us who had been part of the movers-and-shakers now find ourselves ostracized at their carefully casual lunches. Our data flows are crudely monitored.
Twelve against 188. We’ve planned for this.
~~~
A single dog escaped the fire-bombing of North Wales. A golden retriever as far as anyone could tell, it got as far as the ruins of Liverpool where radiation killed it. That was far enough.
The virus it carried interacted with adapted harmless gut bacteria released into the wild years before. The resulting airborne virus infected, and proved extremely virulent in, primates.
Soft-hearted US servicemen fed the dogs and returned home at the end of their rotations carrying a virus with an incubation period of 18 months and a fatality rate of 75 percent.
The rate of increase of global population began to fall six months after the dog escaped. The total population of the US began to fall at the same time.
The US lost five million people before the vaccine was perfected; it became a military dictatorship in order to survive.
I proved to be immune to the virus.
~~~
After rehab I returned to my studies with a little more enthusiasm than before and cut back on the drugs.
I soon got back my usual stratospheric grades and DNV, using some arcane, trade secret, adolescent behavior metric, gave me a six-month recertification.
All was good. Even my parents’ marriage.
“It works better when we’re together and we’re going to be working as a team for a very long time.”
“And when the ship leaves?” I asked.
“We’ll still be working on improvements and fixes to send on for centuries, if we live that long.”
I could tell Father felt the conversation was over and that I should leave his office.
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