World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine (35 page)

No paperwork after all, then.

***

NASA’s high-altitude prototype drone was named the LEO-447/33, but everyone from the Director down called it the Kármán Tickler. In polite company, the nickname was attributed to the fact that the drone cruised at an altitude of about sixty miles, just a couple miles short of the Kármán Line—the nominal border between Earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space. But the reason the nickname stuck was the uncanny resemblance the LEO-447/33 bore to a popular sex toy.
 

The Kármán Tickler’s shaft was hollow, designed to carry up to eight trainee astronauts. Weightlessness training was a necessary—but highly expensive—part of NASA’s program. If the Kármán Tickler, a lightweight and comparatively energy-efficient drone could do the job without even the need for a pilot, NASA hoped to partly fund other projects by offering highly-priced weightless trips to members of the public. If, that is, members of the public wouldn’t be reluctant to climb inside a giant penis.

“I hope this works,” thought Seb, as they arrived in the Tickler. “It seems a hell of a risk not to Walk to the ship directly.” He realized he was still expecting a response from Seb2. He experienced the mental experience of a stumble, before righting himself and taking a breath.

If he’d risked a direct Walk, H’wan may have turned on him. The ship might have said he wouldn’t intervene with the Rozzers’ mission, but H’wan had said nothing about not trying to kill Seb if
he
got involved. This way, he stood a chance of getting to the Engine unnoticed.

Seb’s arrival and departure on the Tickler were separated by 16.58 seconds. He had intended moving on immediately, but when he’d emerged inside the Tickler, he’d found all seven trainees, plus their instructor, unconscious. Rather than expecting everyone to wear breathing apparatus, the Tickler’s designers—with one eye on the marketability of their weightless fun flights—were trying out a pressurized cabin for the first time. The air supply had experienced a catastrophic failure, and the occupants of the craft had less than a minute left before their bodies shut down, followed by brain damage, then death.
 

Seb found the fault and replaced the ruptured hoses that had not been tested comprehensively at this speed or altitude. The air supply resumed. The trainees would wake up in a few minutes. He knew his Manna-produced replacement hoses would not go unnoticed once the Tickler was back on the ground, so he left a note on the onboard e-log saying,
Test your life-support systems more rigorously next time
. He wondered what NASA would make of it. He shrugged and Walked.

***

Massimo was only a few minutes away from the end of his shift fixing the solar array. He’d always tried to stay as long as possible on previous trips outside, but this time, all he wanted to do was crawl back through the airlock. Back into the beautiful, smelly, claustrophobic ISS where he could see some familiar objects. Rather than huge alien spaceships.
 

The spaceship was still there, he knew that. He’d last checked about two minutes ago, by glancing over his shoulder while humming the Duke of Mantua’s aria from Rigoletto and pretending nothing was amiss.

“Tum tum, tum, tumtitum, qual piuma al vento, there are the solar panels, tightening this one now. Mm, mm, mm mm-mm-mmm, mm, mm, di pensier, there is the su-n, there is the spaceship. Sempre un amibile, tum tum tum tumtitum.”
 

Finally turning his back on the cheese-produced hallucination, he started making his way back along the length of the array, his mood improving as he got closer to the hub of the ISS. He’d even be glad to see that grump, Petr.
 

“Muta d’acce—nto, oh, what the crap is that?!”

He was halfway along the array. His path was blocked by a pair of sneakers. The sneakers contained a pair of feet and—as he slowly raised his eyes—he confirmed the usual complement of legs, torso, arms and head were also present. No spacesuit, though. Just a guy. Standing on the solar array of the International Space Station in the deadly cold vacuum of space. Surely, even American cheese wasn’t capable of producing such a hallucination as this. Massimo began to suspect poisoning. It had to be Chuck. Anyone who listened to that much country music couldn’t be trusted.

The man squatted down in front of him. He had an intelligent, friendly face. He raised a finger to his lips. Massimo shrugged. Who was he gonna tell? It would be the last communication he ever made as a professional astronaut. Robust mental health was pretty high up the list of job requirements when you worked in space. The stranger then shuffled to one side, making enough room for Massimo to get past. He waved him through.
 

Massimo looked back twice on the way to the airlock. The first time, the man was still there, crouched, staring at the alien craft. Massimo noticed that the space immediately around the figure looked slightly distorted. Almost as if he was wearing some kind of invisible suit. Massimo then realized such speculation meant he was beginning to accept the evidence of his eyes. He shook his head.
 

The second time Massimo looked back, the figure had gone. Massimo wondered if his digestive system had finally done its job. He looked to see if the spaceship had also evaporated, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Halfway between the ISS and the spaceship, the sneakers guy was crossing empty space. From Massimo’s angle, it looked like he was going to miss the target—he was heading too far toward the planet below.
 

Then Massimo noticed a change in the spaceship. A hole had appeared in one side, an object had emerged and it was heading toward Earth. The object was dark. No light reflected from its surface. It was shaped like an inverted teardrop, the point facing the ship. The inappropriately-dressed man was on course to intercept it.

The rounded edge of the object started to glow as it penetrated Earth’s atmosphere. The man landed on its side, sticking to it like a fly on candy. Massimo watched in horror and disbelief as the entire teardrop glowed red—then white—hot, the figure clinging to it enduring the same extreme temperatures, his body changing color. Then, just as he thought the man’s body would burst into flame and be reduced to ash, the figure seemed to sink
into
the teardrop, vanishing inside as the whole object made its way through atmospheric layers containing more and more air particles. As its descent was slowed, the heat grew greater and greater. Massimo offered up a silent prayer for the man he’d seen, then reminded himself it was a hallucination.
 

His comms crackled into life. Kramer wasn’t using the husky voice this time. “Massimo! We’re reading a meteor at least three meters in diameter entering the atmosphere. Do you have a visual out there?”

Massimo thought for a few moments before replying. He really,
really
liked his job.

“I see it. It’s big! Why didn’t we pick it up earlier?”

“Can’t answer that,” said Kramer. “Houston only detected it seconds ago. Like it appeared from nowhere. Must be some sort of instrument malfunction.”

“Where’s it going to hit?”

“That’s the good news,” said Kramer. “It’s heading for smack down in the middle of the Atlantic. Should have broken up enough not to cause any problems, luckily. Can’t understand why we didn’t detect it earlier, though. Weird.”

“Si,” said Massimo, looking at the huge spacecraft dwarfing their own. “Weird.”

Chapter 42

The teardrop shape of the Unmaking Engine’s housing was designed to slow its fall by creating a shockwave in front of the blunt end. Unlike humanity’s earliest manned spacecraft, it didn’t need to sacrifice any of its mass to the intense heat, or use thick, heavy, heat resistant material as an outer coating. Instead, the first few hundred layers of particles at the fat end of the teardrop—to a depth just greater than the width of an average human hair—had one simple job: to dissipate heat. As each particle on the outermost layer reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it flew outward and inward. The layers below slowed and cooled the superheated particles. Then, the new outermost layer took the brunt of the acceleration, heating up, dissipating, being slowed and cooled. And so the process continued, repeating itself until the initial fall had been slowed sufficiently.
 

As it fell further through the atmosphere, the blunt end of the teardrop then increased in diameter, stretching outward, becoming, once there was enough air to make it viable, a dome, or bowl, acting like a parachute, every square inch of it instantly reacting to each change in pressure or gust of wind, stabilizing it and slowing its descent dramatically. By the time it was 40,000 feet over the ocean, it had braked to less than two-hundred-and-fifty miles per hour. If it maintained its rate of deceleration, it would be traveling at under seventy mph by the time it reached 7,000 feet, at which point it would deliver its payload—the nine-foot-long cylinder cradled in the center of the bowl. NASA lost contact as the parachute shape was deployed - the material was too thin to register on their instruments. The assumption was that the meteorite had broken up into pieces too small to be detected.

The cylinder contained genetic material ready to rise to the surface of the ocean, once freed from its container. On the surface, it would mimic the qualities of sea water molecules, enabling it to evaporate along with the water, rising up through the atmosphere, condensing into clouds, and finally, raining its deadly contents oval onto the land below. The Unmaking Engine molecules were designed to replicate themselves as they joined the water cycle, so that every drop of rain that fell would eventually be contaminated. All human beings would die, but every other species would survive.

Seb understood the mechanics of the Engine, its capabilities, its destructive power. He didn’t understand it intellectually, he
felt
it in his body. It was a very similar feeling to that which he experienced when listening to a complex piece of music. If he had tried to transcribe the music, force the notes he was hearing onto paper in a form that would make sense, he might have failed. But when he bypassed the part of his brain that wanted to categorize the music and sort it into its component parts: melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture, themes, counterpoints—when that part of his brain was disengaged—he could listen in a radically different way. It was as if he—in his entirety—experienced the music moment by moment in
its
entirety. Whatever the composer was trying to say was often, somehow, greater than the combination of the twelve notes he or she had chosen to arrange in various patterns in order to communicate with the listener. The music was experienced in time, linearly, the only way humans can experience anything. And yet, it was only as a whole that it made sense. Seb felt the same sensation now as he occupied the interior of the cylinder that housed the heart of the Unmaking Engine. His body
knew
the Engine,
knew
what it was dealing with. Instantly.

Seb’s knowledge of the device was analogous to his encounters with great music in one more way, and it was this that gave him pause, despite knowing he had only seconds in which to act. He knew he was going to have to lose himself in the act. People used the expression ‘lost in music’ as a positive statement, an endorsement. Their sense of self had been temporarily suspended by the power of the music. But the effect was temporary—they knew they would ‘find’ themselves again. Seb wasn’t so sure the same was true now.
 

“Will this kill me?”

“Theoretically unlikely,” said Seb2, “but nothing’s impossible. You’re going to have to completely give up conscious control. Your soul, your essence, your atman, whatever you want to call it, will cease to function during the process. I don’t know if you’ll be ‘alive’ in any real sense during that time. And when you come back—if you come back—I don’t know if it will be
you
in the same sense any more. You certainly won’t have a single naturally biological cell left in your body.”

“Will I still be human?”

“Well. Your physical makeup is currently still made up of both nanotech and human cells. That changes as soon as you make this decision. Not that you have a choice. And you might still exist afterward. Who knows?”

“I know you’re me,” thought Seb, “but sometimes, I really want to kick your ass.”

“Hey, I love you too, bro.”

“Ok. Let’s get this done.”

The Unmaking Engine swooped toward the Atlantic Ocean. It hovered over the face of the water, then, with a barely discernible shudder, a ripple made its way across the skin of the vast bowl. When it reached the center, the cylinder dropped toward the waiting ocean.
 

Seb didn’t hesitate. As the cylinder fell, his entire body separated into individual particles. Those cells which were still human didn’t survive the process. The rest reproduced themselves at incredible speed, creating an ovoid shield, or carapace which—a full second before the cylinder hit the ocean—completely surrounded the active genetic material at the Unmaking Engine’s heart.
 

On impact, the cylinder disintegrated as it was designed to do. The core drove on under the surface to a depth of two hundred feet. At this point, it blew apart in a controlled explosion, designed to spread the deadly molecules as far and as wide as possible. Instead of which, they hit the impervious wall of Seb’s carapace and fell back, contained in the hollow space within. The imprisoned weapon continued to drop toward the ocean floor.

The ensuing battle was completely one-sided, since the disease-carrying molecules had no defensive capabilities. The shield that Seb had become began to fill its own hollow interior, closing inexorably in on itself. As it did so, it stripped the Engine of its component parts. Those parts that could be used again were retained, the rest was rendered harmless. This was done through the creation of ‘honey-trap’ molecules. Each of these presented as replicas of human DNA. The Unmaking process took place at the molecular level as it was engineered to do, but, when it was done, each honey-trap molecule died, taking its deadly partner with it.