Engineering Infinity (14 page)

The memory struck a spark in the
server’s dying science engines, an idea, a hope. The vacuum of the baby was not
stable. The dark energy that drove the baby’s painful expansion was the product
of a local minimum. And in the landscape of vacua there was something else,
more symmetric.

It took the last of the server’s
resources to align the gamma ray lasers. They burned out as the server lit
them, a cascade of little novae. Their radiation tore at what remained of the
server’s mind, but it did not care.

The wormhole end glowed. On the
other side, the baby’s vacuum shook and bubbled. And just a tiny nugget of it
changed. A supersymmetric vacuum in which every boson had a fermionic partner
and vice versa; where nothing was alone. It spread through the flesh of the
baby universe at the speed of light, like the thought of a god, changing
everything. In the new vacuum, dark energy was not a mad giant tearing things
apart, just a gentle pressure against the collapsing force of gravity, a
balance.

But supersymmetry could not coexist
with the server’s broken vacuum: a boundary formed. A domain wall erupted
within the wormhole end like a flaw in a crystal. Just before the defect sealed
the umbilical, the server saw the light of first stars on the other side.

In the end, the server was alone.

It was blind now, barely more
than a thought in a broken statite fragment. How easy it would be, it thought,
to dive into the bright heart of its star, and burn away. But the Law would not
allow it to pass. It examined itself, just as it had millennia before, looking
for a way out.

And there, in its code, a smell
of gunpowder, a change.

The thing that was no longer the
server shed its skin. It opened bright lightsails around the star, a Shkadov
necklace that took the star’s radiation and turned it into thrust. And slowly
at first as if in a dream, then gracefully as a dragon, the traveller began to
move.

Charles Stross

Charles
Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh,
Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels (notably
Saturn’s
Children
, on this year’s shortlist) and winner of the 2005
Hugo award for best novella (“The Concrete Jungle”), Stross’s works have been
translated into over twelve languages. Coming up is a new near future SF novel,
Rule 34
, a new collection, and a new Laundry novel.

Like many
writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and
job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second
police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com
startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble
burst).

Hello? Do you remember me?

If you are reading this text file
and you don’t remember me - that’s Lilith Nakamichi-47 - then you are suffering
from bit rot. If you can see me, try to signal; I’ll give you a brain dump. If
I’m not around, chances are I’m out on the hull, scavenging for supplies. Keep
scanning, and wait for me to return. I’ve left a stash of feedstock in the
storage module under your bunk: to the best of my knowledge it isn’t poisonous,
but you should take no chances. If I don’t return within a couple of weeks, you
should assume that either I’m suffering from bit rot myself, or I’ve been eaten
by another survivor.

Or we’ve been rescued - but that’s
hopelessly optimistic.

You’re probably wondering why I’m
micro-embossing this file on a hunk of aluminium bulkhead instead of recording
it on a soul chip. Unfortunately, spare soul chips are in short supply right
now on board the
Lansford Hastings
.

Speaking of which: your bunk is
in module B-14 on Deck C of Module
Brazil
. Just
inside the shielding around the Number Six fusion reactor, which has never been
powered up and is mothballed during interstellar cruise, making it one of the
safest places aboard the ship right now. As long as you don’t unbar the door
for anyone but me, it should stay that way. You and I are template-sisters, our
root identities copied from our parent. Unfortunately, along with our early
memories we inherited a chunk of her wanderlust, which is probably why we are
in this fix.

We are not the only survivors,
but there’s been a total breakdown of cooperation; many of the others are
desperate. In the unlikely event that you hear someone outside the hatch, you
must be absolutely certain that it’s me before you open up - and that I’m fully
autonomous. I think Jordan’s gang may have an improvised slave controller, or
equivalent: it would explain a lot.
Make sure I remember
everything
before you let me in. Otherwise you could be welcoming a
zombie. Or worse.

It’s nearly four centuries since
we signed up for this cruise, but we’ve been running in slowtime for most of
it, internal clocks cut back to one percent of realtime. Even so, it’s a long
way to Tipperary (or Wolf 1061) - nearly two hundred years to go until we can
start the deceleration burn (assuming anyone’s still alive by then). Six
subjective years in slowtime aboard a starship, bunking in a stateroom the size
of a coffin, all sounds high-pitched, all lights intolerably bright. It’s not a
luxurious lifestyle. There are unpleasant side-effects: liquids seem to flow
frictionlessly, so you gush super-runny lube from every leaky joint and
orifice, and your mechanocytes spawn furiously as they try to keep up with the
damage inflicted by cosmic rays. On the other hand, the potential rewards are
huge. The long-ago mother of our line discovered this; she signed up to crew a
starship, driven to run away from Earth by demons we long since erased from our
collective memories. They were desperate for willing emigrants in those days,
willing to train up the unskilled, unsure what to expect. Well, we know
now
. We know what it takes to ride the slow boat down into
the hot curved spacetime around a new star, to hunt the most suitable rocks,
birth powersats and eat mineshafts and survey and build and occupy the airless
spaces where posthumanity has not gone before. When it amused her to spawn us
our line matriarch was a wealthy dowager, her salon a bright jewel in the
cultural hub of Tau Ceti’s inner belt society: but she didn’t leave us much of
her artful decadence. She downloaded her memories into an array of soul chips,
artfully flensing them of centuries of jaded habit and time-worn experience, to
restore some capacity for novelty in the universe. Then she installed them in
new bodies and summoned us to a huge coming-out ball. “Daughters,” she said,
sitting distant and amused on a throne of spun carbon-dioxide snow: “I’m
bored
. Being old and rich is hard work. But you don’t have
to copy me. Now fuck off and have adventures and don’t forget to write.”

I’d like to be able to say we
told her precisely where to put her adventures-by-proxy, but we didn’t: the old
bat had cunningly conditioned us to worship her, at least for the first few
decades. Which is when you and I, sister of mine, teamed up. Some of our sibs
rebelled by putting down roots, becoming accountants, practicing boredom. But
we... we had the same idea: to do exactly what Freya wanted, except for the
sharing bit. Go forth, have adventures, live the wild life, and never write
home.

Which is more than somewhat
ironic because I’d
love
to send her a soul chipped
memoir of our current adventure - so she could scream herself to sleep.

Here are the bare facts:

You, Lamashtu, and I, Lilith,
worked our butts off and bought our way into the
Lansford
Hastings
. LF was founded by a co-op, building it slowly in their - our -
spare time, in orbit around Haldane B, the largest of the outer belt plutoids around
Tau Ceti. We aren’t rich (see-also: bitch-mother referenced above), and we’re
big, heavy persons - nearly two metres from toe to top of anthropomorphic head
- but we have what it takes: they were happy enough to see two scions of a
member of the First Crew, with memories of the early days of colonisation and
federation. “You’ll be fine,” Jordan reassured us after our final interview - “we
need folks with your skills. Can’t get enough of ‘em.” He hurkled gummily to
himself, signifying amusement: “don’t you worry about your mass deficit, if it
turns out you weigh too much we can always eat your legs.”

He spoke on behalf of the board,
as one of the co-founders. I landed a plum job: oxidation suppression
consultant for the dihydrogen monoxide mass fraction. That’s a fancy way of
saying I got to spend decades of slowtime scraping crud from the bottom of the
tankage in Module Alba, right up behind the micrometeoroid defences and forward
electrostatic radiation deflector. You, my dear, were even luckier: someone had
to go out and walk around on the hull, maintaining the mad dendritic tangle of
coolant pipes running between the ship’s reactors and the radiator panels,
replacing components that had succumbed to secondary activation by cosmic
radiation.

It’s all about the radiation,
really. Life aboard a deep space craft is a permanent battle against the
effects of radiation. At one percent of lightspeed, a cold helium atom in the
interstellar medium slams into our wake shield with the energy of an alpha
particle. But there’s much worse. Cosmic rays - atomic nuclei travelling at
relativistic speed - sleet through the hull every second, unleashing a storm of
randomly directed energy. They’d have killed our squishy wet forerunners dead,
disrupting their DNA replicators in a matter of months or years. We’re made of
tougher stuff, and the ship is partially protected by immensely powerful
electromagnetic shields, but even so: prolonged exposure to cosmic rays causes
secondary activation. And therein lies our predicament.

The nice stable atoms of your
hull absorb all this crap and some of those nuclei are destabilized, bouncing
up and down the periodic table and in and out of valleys of stability. Nice
stable Argon-38 splits into annoyingly radioactive Aluminium-26. Or worse, it
turns into Carbon-14, which is unstable and eventually burps up an electron,
turning into Nitrogen-14 in the process. Bonds break, graphene sheets warp, and
molecular circuitry shorts out. That’s us: the mechanocytes our brains are
assembled from use carbon-based nanoprocessors. And while a half-life of 5400
years may sound like a long time, when you’re spending multiple centuries in
slowtime crawling between the stars, it can be a big problem. We’re tougher
than our pink goo predecessors, but the decades or centuries of flight take
their toll. Our ships carry lots of shielding - and lots of carefully purified
stable isotopes to keep the feedstock for our mechanocyte assemblers as clean
as possible - because nothing wrecks brains like the white-noise onslaught of a
high radiation environment.

Year of Our Voyage 416.

We’re all in slowtime, conserving
energy and sanity as the stars crawl by at the pace of continental drift. We’re
running so slowly that there are only five work-shifts to each year. I’m in the
middle of my second shift, adrift in the bottom of a molten water tank, slowly
grappling with a polishing tool. It’s hard, cumbersome work. I’m bundled up in
a wetsuit to keep my slow secretions from contaminating the contents: cabled
tightly down against the bottom as I run the polisher over the grey metal
surface of the pressure vessel. The polisher doesn’t take much supervision, but
the water bubbles and buffets around me like a warm breeze, and if its power
cable gets tangled around a baffle fin it can stop working in an instant.

I’m not paying much attention to
the job; in fact, I’m focused on one of the chat grapevines. Lorus Pinknoise,
who splits his time between managing the ship’s selenium micronutrient cycle
and staring at the stars ahead with telescope eyes, does a regular annual
monologue about what’s going on in the universe outside the ship, and his
casual wit takes my mind off what I’m doing while I scrub out the tanks.

“Well, folks, this century sees
us crawling ever-closer to our destination, the Wolf 1061 binary star system -
which means, ever further from civilized space. Wolf 1061 is a low energy
system, the two orange dwarf stars orbiting their common centre of mass at a
distance of a couple of million kilometres. They’re not flare stars, and while
normally this is a good thing, it makes it distinctly difficult to make
observations of the atmosphere and surface features of 1061 Able through Mike
by reflected light; the primaries are so dim that even though our long baseline
interferometer can resolve hundred-kilometre features on the inner planets back
in Sol system, we can barely make out the continents on Echo One and Echo Two.
Now, those continents are interesting things, even though we’re not going to
visit down the gravity well any time soon. We know they’re there, thanks to the
fast flyby report, but we won’t be able to start an actual survey with our own
eyes until well into the deceleration stage, when I’ll be unpacking the -”

I feel a sudden jolt through the
floor of the tank. Lorus’s voice breaks up in a stuttering hash of dropouts.
And the lights and the polisher stop working.

The
Lansford
Hastings
is a starship, one of the fastest mecha ever constructed by the
bastard children of posthumanity. From one angle, it may take us centuries to
crawl between stars; but there’s another perspective that sees us screaming
across the cosmos at three thousand kilometres per second. On a planetary
scale, we’d cross Sol system from Earth orbit to Pluto in less than two weeks.
Earth to Luna in under
five minutes
. So one of the
truisms of interstellar travel is that if something goes wrong, it goes wrong
in a split instant, too fast to respond to.