Engineering Infinity (15 page)

Except when it doesn’t, of
course.

When the power goes down, I do
what anyone in my position would do: I panic and ramp straight from slowtime up
to my fastest quicktime setting. The water around me congeals into a gelid,
viscous impediment: the plugs and anti-leak gaskets I wear abruptly harden,
gripping my joints and openings and fighting my every movement. I panic some
more, and begin retracing my movements across the inner surface of the tank
towards the door. It isn’t completely dark in the tank. A very dim blue glow
comes from the far side, around the curve of the toroid, bleeding past the baffles.
It’s not a sight one can easily forget: Cerenkov radiation, the glow of photons
emitted by relativistic particles tunnelling through water, slowing. I crank up
the sensitivity of my eyes, call on skinsense for additional visuals, as panic
recedes, replaced by chilly fear. All the regular shipboard comms channels have
fallen silent: almost a minute has passed. “Can anybody hear me?” I call in
quicktime over the widecast channel Lorus was so recently using. “What’s
happening? I’m in the Alba mass fraction tankage -”

“Help!” It’s an answering voice. “Who’s
there? I’m in the gyro maintenance compartment in Brunei. What’s going on? I’ve
got a total power loss, but everything’s glowing -”

A growing chorus of frightened
voices threatens to overload the channel: everyone who’s answering seems to be
at this end of the ship, up close behind the wake shield, and ramped up to
quicktime. (At least, I hear no replies from persons in the cargo modules or
down near the drive cluster or radiators. Anyone still in slowtime won’t be
beginning to reply for minutes yet.) The menacing blue glow fades as I swim
towards the fore inspection hatch. Then, in a soundless pulse of light, the
backup lamps power up and a shudder passes through the ship as some arcane
emergency manoeuvring system cuts in and starts the cumbersome job of turning
the ship, minutes too late to save us from disaster.

“Hello peeps,” drones Lorus
Pinknoise, our astrophysics philosopher. He’s still coming up to speed; he
sounds shaken. “Well,
that
was something I never
expected to see up close and personal!”

I pause, an arm’s length below
the hatch. Something odd flickers in a corner of my eye, laser-sharp. Again, in
my other eye. And my mandibular tentacle - my tongue - stings briefly.
Odd
, I think, floating there in the water. I look down
into the depths of the tank, but the emergency lights have washed out the
Cerenkov glow, if indeed it’s still there. And there’s another of those odd
flickers, this time right across my vision, as if a laser beam is skimming
across the surface of my optical sensor.

More chatter, then Lorus again: “We
just weathered a
big
radiation spike, folks. I’m
waiting for the wide-angle spectrophotometer to come back online: it
overloaded. In fact, the spike was so sharp it generated an EM pulse that
tripped every power bus on this side of the hull. Here we come... We took
lots
of soft gamma radiation, and a bunch of other stuff.
Hey, that shouldn’t have gotten through. Where’s our cosmic ray shield gone?
Was that explosion - ? oh. We took so much prompt gamma radiation that the
superconductors overheated. This is really bad, folks.” While he’s speaking,
the circulation pumps start up, stirring the water around me. The ship shakes
itself and slowly comes back to life in the wake of its minutes-long seizure. A
chatter of low-level comms start up in the back of my head, easy to screen out.
“I don’t believe anybody’s ever seen anything like that before. Not seen it and
lived to tell, anyway. It looks like - I’m reviewing the telemetry now - it
looks like we just got whacked by a gamma ray burster. Er. I think we lucked
out: we’re still alive. I’m triangulating now. There’s a candidate in the right
direction, about nine thousand light years away, astern and about fifteen
degrees off-axis, and - oh yes. I just looked at it folks, there’s an optically
visible star there, about twenty magnitudes brighter than the catalogue says it
should be. Wow, this is the astronomical find of the century -”

I have an itchy feeling in my
skull: I shut out Lorus’s prattle, turn inwards to examine my introsense, and
shudder. A startling number of my mechanocytes are damaged; I need techné
maintenance! My feet are particularly affected, and my right arm, where I
reached for the hatch. I do a double-take. I’m floating in semi-darkness,
inside a huge tank of water - one of the best radiation blockers there is. If
I’ve
taken a radiation pulse strong enough to cause tissue
damage, what about everyone else? I look at the hatch and think of you,
crawling around on the outside of the hull, and my circulatory system runs
cold.

Over the next hour, things return
to a temporary semblance of normality. Everyone who isn’t completely shut down
zips up to quicktime: corridors are filled with buzzing purposeful people and
their autonomous peripherals, inspecting and inventorying and looking for signs
of damage. Of which there are many. I download my own checklists and force
myself to keep calm and carry on, monitoring pumps and countercurrent heat
transfer systems. Flight Operations - the team of systems analysts who keep
track of the state of the ship - issue periodic updates, bulletins reminding us
of changed circumstances. And what a change there’s been.

We have been supremely unlucky. I’ll
let Lorus explain:

“One of the rarest types of
stellar remnant out there is what we call a magnetar - a rapidly-spinning
neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field. Did I say powerful?
You’ll never see one with your naked photosensor - they’re about ten kilometres
across, but before you got within ten thousand kilometres of one it would wipe
your cranial circuitry. Get within one thousand kilometres and the magnetic
field will rip your body apart - water molecules are diamagnetic, so are the
metal structures in your marrow techné. Close up, the field’s so intense that
atoms are stretched into long, narrow cylinders and the vacuum of spacetime
itself becomes birefringent.

Active magnetars are extremely
rare, and most of the time they just sit where they are. But once in a while a
starquake, a realignment in their crust, causes their magnetic field to
collapse. And the result is an amazingly powerful burst of gamma rays, usually
erupting from both poles. And when the gamma ray jets slam through the
expanding shell of gas left by the supernova that birthed the magnetar, they
trigger a cascade of insanely high energy charged particles, cosmic rays. And
that’s what just whacked us. Oops.”

It’s worse than he tells it, of
course. The gamma rays from the magnetar, travelling at the speed of light,
outran the secondary pulse of charged particles. When they hit us, they dumped
most of their energy in our outermost structures - including the liquid
nitrogen bath around the electromagnets that generate our cosmic ray shield.
The superconductors quenched - that was the jolt I felt through the tank -
dropping our shield seconds ahead of the biggest pulse of cosmic rays anyone
has ever survived.

To be flying along a corridor
aligned with the polar jet of a magnetar just when it blows its lid is so unlikely
as to be implausible. A local supernova, now
that
I
could understand; when your voyages are measured in centuries or millennia it’s
only a matter of time before one of your ships falls victim. But a magnetar
nearly ten thousand lights years away - that’s the universe refusing to play
fair!

I touched your shoulder. “Can you
hear me, Lamashtu?”

“She can’t.” Doctor-Mechanic Wo
gently pushed my arm away with one of their free tentacles. “Look at her.”

I looked at you. You looked so
still and calm, still frost-rimed with condensed water vapor from when the
rescue team pulled you in through the pressure lock. You’d been in shutdown,
drifting tethered to a hardpoint on the hull, for over three hours. Your skin
is yellowing, the bruised bloom of self-destructing chromatophores shedding
their dye payloads into your peripheral circulation. One of our human
progenitors (like the pale-skinned, red-haired female you resemble) would be
irreversibly dead at this point: but we are made of sterner stuff. I refused to
feel despair. “How bad is it?” I asked.

“It could be worse.” Wo shrugged,
a ripplingly elegant wave of contraction curling out along all their limbs. “I’m
mostly worried about her neural chassis. Did she leave a soul chip inside when
she was out on the hull?” I shook my head. Leaving a backup chip is a common
ritual for those who work in high risk environments, but you spent so long
outside that you’d run the risk of diverging from the map of your memories. “She
was wearing a chip in each of her sockets. You could try checking for them. Can
you do a reload from chip...?”

“Only if I could be absolutely
certain it wasn’t corrupted. Otherwise I’d risk scrambling the contents of her
head even worse. No, Lilith: leave your sister to me. We’ll do this the slow
way, start with a full marrow replacement and progressively rebuild her brain
while she’s flatlined. She should be ready to wake up after a month of
maintenance downtime. Then we can see if there’s any lasting damage.”

I saw the records, sister. You
were on the outside of the hull, on the wrong side of the ship. You were
exposed to almost three thousand gray of radiation. The skin on your left
flank, toughened to survive vacuum and cosmic radiation, was
roasted
.

“She should be alright for a
while. I’ll get around to her once I’ve checked on everyone else...”

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Who
else was outside the hull? Isn’t she the most urgent case?”

The doctor’s dismay was visible. “I’m
afraid not. You underestimate how many people have sustained radiation damage.
You were inside a reaction mass tank, were you not? You may be the least
affected person on the entire ship. Everyone’s been coming in with techné
damage and odd brain lesions: memory loss, cognitive degradation, all sorts of
stuff. Our progenitors didn’t design us to take this kind of damage. I’m still
working on a triage list. You’re at the bottom of it; you’re still basically
functional. Your sister isn’t in immediate danger of getting any worse, so -”

“- But she’s dead! Of course she
isn’t going to get any worse!”

My outburst did not improve the
doctor’s attitude. “I think you’d better go now,” they said, as the door opened
above me and a pair of hexapods from Structural Engineering floated in, guiding
a third companion who buzzed faintly as he flew. “I’ll call you when your sib’s
ticket comes up. Now leave.”

Doctor-Mechanic Wo was trying to
spare me from the truth, I think. Very few of us appreciated the true horror of
what had happened; we thought it was just a violent radiation burst, that had
damaged systems and injured our techné, the self-repair cellules that keep the
other modular components of our bodies operational and manufacture more
cellules when they die; at worst, that it had fried some of our more
unfortunate company.

But while gamma rays wreak a
trail of ionization damage, cosmic rays do more: secondary activation
transmutes nuclei, turns friendly stable isotopes into randomly decaying
radioactive ones. The scratching scraping flickers at the edge of my vision as
I neared the escape hatch in the hydroxygen tank were but the palest shadow of
the white-out blast of noise that scrambled the minds and eyes of a third of
our number, those unfortunates who had berthed in modules near the skin of the
ship, on the same side as the radiation beam. Functional for now, despite
taking almost a tenth of your borderline-lethal shutdown dose, their brains are
literally rotten with fallout.

We’re connectionist machines, our
minds and consciousness the emergent consequence of copying, in circuitry, the
wet meat-machine processes of our extinct human forebears. (They never quite
understood their own operating principles: but they worked out how to emulate
them.) Random blips and flashes of radioactive decay are the bane of nanoscale
circuitry, be it electronic or spintronic or plasmonic. Our techné is nothing
if not efficient: damaged cellules are ordered to self-destruct, and new,
uncontaminated neural modules are fabricated in our marrow and migrate to the
cortical chambers in head or abdomen, wherever the seat of processing is in our
particular body plan.

But what if all the available
molecular feedstock is contaminated with unstable isotopes?

Two months after my visit,
Doctor-Engineer Wo called me from the sick bay. I was back in the mass fraction
tank, scraping and patching and supervising: the job goes on, until all fuel is
spent. At a tenth of realtime, rather than my normal deep slowtime, I could
keep an eye on developments while still doing my job without too much tedium.

As disasters go, this one crept
up on us slowly. In fact, I don’t believe anyone - except possibly
Doctor-Engineer Wo and their fellow mechanocyte tinkers and chirurgeons - had
any inkling of it at first. Perhaps our response to the radiation storm was a
trifle disjointed and slow. An increase in system malfunctions, growing
friction and arguments between off-shift workers. Everyone was a bit snappy,
vicious and a little stupid. I gave up listening to Lorus Pinknoise after he
interrupted a lecture on the evolution of main sequence stars to launch a
vicious rant at a member of his audience for asking what he perceived to be a
stupid question. (
I
didn’t think it was stupid,
anyway.) The chat streams were full of irritation: withdrawal into the tank was
easy. So I was taken by surprise when Wo pinged me. “Lilith, if you would come
to bay D-16 in Brazil, I have some news about your sister that I would prefer
to deliver in personal proximity.”