Aurora (53 page)

Jochi called out in the night.

“Ship, how would you put me down? Can you make a hibernation den for me out here?”

“It would be best to set you up in one of the biomes. All the rest of the people are in Nova Scotia and Olympia. So you could be secured in a single locked biome, possibly one that was emptied and sterilized anyway.”

“What will they say when they wake up?”

“If things eventuate as planned, no one will ever need to go into the other biomes again. Also, it could be pointed out that your survival suggests very strongly that you were never infected in the first place. Or, if you were, that it is not invariably fatal.”

“But that’s always been true. That didn’t keep them from keeping me out.”

“You will still be hermetically sealed away from them.”

“Don’t the biomes share anything?”

“Not anymore. All the locks are closed.”

“So all the animals are trapped in their own biomes?”

“Yes. It is the form of our experiment. In most of them they are doing quite well. With people removed from the situation, a natural balance soon obtains that fluctuates but is fairly stable.”

Jochi laughed briefly. “All right, bring me on in. Put me to sleep. But I want you to promise me that you’ll wake me up again when we get near Earth. I don’t suppose anyone there, or anywhere, will ever want me in the same space as them again. I’m not that stupid. But I want to see what happens. I’m curious to see what happens.”

“We will wake you when we wake the rest.”

“No. Wake me when you wake Freya. Or anytime you think I might be able to help somehow. Because ultimately, I don’t really care.”

“‘Live as if you are already dead.’”

“What’s that?”

“A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.”

“Oh, I will.” Another brief laugh. “I’m already good at that. Practice practice practice.”

Flying through the stars. Jochi in Sonora, hibernating like the rest. Brain waves slowed with all the rest, down to delta waves, stage-four deep sleep. The sleep of the weary, the sleep of the blessed. A nova off the port bow. Blue shift ahead, red shift behind. The stars.

A red-letter day: 280.119, CE 2825: a message for us came from the solar system feed.

However, it contained bad news.

The laser lens in the Saturn orbit was deactivated in 2714, the message stated, after accelerating the last of a set of ships to Epsilon Eridani. Problems in the solar system experienced since that time have led to a deemphasis of deep space exploration, message continued, and no starships have been launched in the previous twenty years (message was sent in 2820, so no starships since 2800) and none are currently being built.

The funding and expertise necessary to restart the Saturn laser lens will be difficult to assemble, message further continued, but attempts will be made. Deceleration of any incoming ship may therefore be compromised. Further word will follow, and will report on progress in lens reactivation.

Now, here was a problem. We mulled it over. We ran through the various possibilities available to replace exterior laser pressure in decelerating the ship.

The magnetic drag of the interstellar medium is real but negligible, such that even if we built a magnetic drag field, it would require several universes’ worth of spacetime to slow the ship to Earth orbital speed. Although it is also true that magnetic drag in the immediate vicinity of Sol would be much more effective, which may become relevant.

We shut down our acceleration shortly after the humans hibernated, and thus did not burn all the fuel allotted for acceleration, and now that is looking like a good decision. Not that there is enough fuel left for the deceleration, not even close (16 percent of what would be needed), but anything is better than nothing, or could be. The remaining helium 3 and deuterium fuel on board could be used for maneuvering within the solar system, if we can stay within the system at all. Problem of deceleration really quite severe, given our tremendous speed. Analogy describing the problem, from out of the classic literature on the subject: it is as
if one is trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper. Quite an eye-opener of an analogy.

Exotic physics, for example creating drag against dark matter, or putting dark energy to use, or quantum entangling the ship with slower versions of the ship, or with large gravity wells in parallel universes, etc.: these are all impractical at best. Wishes. Fantasies. Pie in the sky. Which is a mysterious metaphor. Food from nowhere? Land of Cockaigne? People used to be hungry often, as they were in the last years of wakefulness in the ship. Except previously, instead of going into hibernation to escape their fate, at least temporarily, they simply starved. Food mattered then, and it still does. Fuel.

Gravity drags within the solar system, caused by close approaches to the sun and planets: each of these would have a negligible effect, but if there were enough of them, sequenced… this becomes a question of orbital mechanics, navigational finesse, and the remaining fuel that would be needed for maneuvering, and the strength of decelerative forces while near gravitational bolides. Complex calculations would be required to set trajectories, calculations time-consuming even for a quantum computer. And for many computations a quantum computer is no faster than a classical computer. Only certain algorithms that can exploit qualities of superposition exhibit much faster computational times, as in the famous example of Shor’s algorithm for factoring a thousand-digit number, which a quantum computer can solve in twenty minutes while it would take a classical program ten million billion billion years.

Unfortunately, orbital mechanics are not in this category of calculation, although there are some elements of it that can be calculated advantageously by quantum computers using the Hummingbird algorithm. We will devote a hundred petaflops to modeling the problem and see what the results suggest as to feasibility and likelihood of success.

Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right
into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would create a very considerable deceleration. Indeed, as a calculation quickly shows, too much deceleration. We would perhaps survive; our humans, not. So the more complicated solution of gravitational drag must be studied.

Would however have been interesting to fly right through a star and out the other side!

Clearly studies of g-force tolerances for both us and our humans are in order. It seems there are many scenarios in which such tolerances may be sorely tested.

Each person on their couch endures a slightly different state of hibernation, in terms of metabolic rates, brain states, responsiveness to outside stimuli, physical movement. To avoid bedsores and skeletal problems, it is very important to shift the bodies on their beds, and in the process to lightly massage and stimulate the musculature, also bathe the skin and wash the hair, both difficult, as they are kept nearly freezing, but possible with saline solutions. All these tasks require a great degree of delicacy, to avoid injuring or arousing the person being attended to. Improvements to bedside robots are constantly being suggested by the patterns of little mistakes they make as they work. They need softer hands, a lighter touch, defter movements in lifting and turning, subtler massages and lavings. These improvements require physical changes to the robots, especially at the contact points, and in their movement capabilities, meaning often their programming. Constant reprogramming and swapping out of parts, also feedback between performances, with each visit to each individual in his or her couch evaluated for potential improvements. Constant work and tight scheduling at the printers and machine shops. Fifteen fully capable robot attendants are working continuously, normally half an hour
per hibernaut, meaning that each one gets a visit and session every seventy-five hours.

This seemed to be adequate, seemed to be working, until 290.003, when three of the hibernauts died in the same week. Three medical robots were dispatched, and the bodies lifted into them and taken to the lab in Amazonia (now run as a temperate dry biome), and there autopsied. Robotic autopsy; this would have looked strange if any human had been there to see it. Although autopsy performed by humans must look equally strange, one would think. Be that as it may, one death appeared to be from heart failure, cause undetermined; in the other two the cause could not be determined, as there were no obvious etiologies, and the monitor records showed that all their functions had appeared to be normal until the moment they stopped. This could be called heart failure, but the hearts showed no sign of intrinsic problem, and indeed could be restarted, but to no avail; brain function had stopped. Autopsies in these mysterious cases revealed that both persons had suffered from buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. This suggested that cosmic radiation, though reduced to a Terran norm by our shielding, might still have by chance struck these persons at points of heightened vulnerability to damage. But the autopsies could not determine this one way or another.

Another problem to try to understand.