Rifters 4 - Blindsight (45 page)

Sometimes electrical stimulation of the brain induces "alien hand syndrome"— the involuntary movement of the body against the will of the "person" allegedly in control
²⁹
. Other times it provokes equally involuntary movements, which subjects nonetheless insist they "chose" to perform despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary
³⁰
.
Put all this together with the fact that the body begins to act before the brain even "decides" to move
³¹
(but see
^32
,
33
), and the whole concept of
free will
—despite the undeniable subjective
feeling
that it's real—begins to look a teeny bit silly, even outside the influence of alien artefacts.

While electromagnetic stimulation is currently the most trendy approach to hacking the brain, it's hardly the only one. Gross physical disturbances ranging from tumors
³⁴
to tamping irons
³⁵
can turn normal people into psychopaths and pedophiles (hence that new persona sprouting in Susan James's head). Spirit possession and rapture can be induced through the sheer emotional bump-and-grind of religious rituals, using no invasive neurological tools at all (and not even necessarily any pharmacological ones)
²¹
. People can even develop a sense of ownership of body parts that aren't theirs, can be convinced that a rubber hand is their real one
³⁶
. Vision trumps propioreception: a prop limb, subtly manipulated, is enough to convince us that we're doing one thing while in fact we're doing something else entirely
^37
,
38
.

The latest tool in this arsenal is ultrasound: less invasive than electromagnetics, more precise than charismatic revival, it can be used to boot up brain activity
³⁹
without any of those pesky electrodes or magnetic hairnets. In
Blindsight
it serves as a convenient back door to explain why
Rorschach
's hallucinations persist even in the presence of Faraday shielding— but in the here and now, Sony has been renewing an annual patent for a machine which uses ultrasonics to implant "sensory experiences" directly into the brain
⁴⁰
. They're calling it an entertainment device with massive applications for online gaming. Uh huh. And if you can implant sights and sounds into someone's head from a distance, why not implant political beliefs and the irresistable desire for a certain brand of beer while you're at it?

Are We There Yet?

The "telematter" drive that gets our characters to the story is based on teleportation studies reported in
Nature
⁴¹
,
Science,
^42
,
43
Physical Review Letters
⁴⁴
, and (more recently) everyone and their dog
^e.g.,
45
. The idea of transmitting antimatter specs as a fuel template is, so far as I know, all mine. To derive plausible guesses for
Theseus
's fuel mass, accelleration, and travel time I resorted to The Relativistic Rocket
⁴⁶
, maintained by the mathematical physicist John Baez at UC Riverside.
Theseus
' use of magnetic fields as radiation shielding is based on research out of MIT
⁴⁷
. I parked the (solar powered) Icarus Array right next to the sun because the production of antimatter is likely to remain an extremely energy-expensive process for the near future
^48
,
49
.

The undead state in which
Theseus
carries her crew is, of course, another iteration of the venerable suspended animation riff (although I'd like to think I've broken new ground by invoking vampire physiology as the mechanism). Two recent studies have put the prospect of induced hibernation closer to realization. Blackstone
et al
. have induced hibernation in mice by the astonishingly-simple expedient of exposing them to hydrogen sulfide
⁵⁰
; this gums up their cellular machinery enough to reduce metabolism by 90%. More dramatically (and invasively), researchers at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh claim
⁵¹
to have resurrected a dog three hours after clinical death, via a technique in which the animal's blood supply was replaced by an ice-cold saline solution
⁵²
. Of these techniques, the first is probably closer to what I envisioned, although I'd finished the first draft before either headline broke. I considered rejigging my crypt scenes to include mention of hydrogen sulfide, but ultimately decided that fart jokes would have ruined the mood.

The Game Board

Blindsight
describes Big Ben as an "Oasa Emitter". Officially there's no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters
^53
,
54
— dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common
^55
,
56
— ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa's emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist
⁵⁷
).

Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants
^{58
,
59
,
60
,
61
,
62
,
63
,
64}
and/or brown dwarves
^{65
,
66
,
67
,
68
,
69
,
70
,
71
,
72
, ,
73
,
74
,
75}
, scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of
Rorschach
's ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick
⁷⁶
. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field
⁷⁷
.

Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 2000 Cr
₁₀₅
, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system
⁷⁸
.

Scrambler Anatomy and Physiology

Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may
look
alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an "alien" that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.

Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge— and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you've-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler's distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction— the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk— takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but...

Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He's right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own "mirror neurons" fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action
⁷⁹
; this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness
^80
,
81
,
82
.

Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it's more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn
slow
for advanced multicellularity
⁸³
. Cunningham's proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.