Lost in Transmission

Chapter four. Of creation and power, and the finding of oneself

Conrad was minding his own business, sliding down the ladder railing and whistling some half-remembered tune, when everything around him lurched violently to starboard. The railing was yanked out from under him, and he flailed backward, and would have hit the floor if the wall hadn't come along and hit him first.

“Ow!” he cried, just as the floor really did come up and smack him in the butt. “Little gods!”

“Collision avoidance. Sorry, people,” said the voice of Robert M'chunu over the intercom.

“Get processed,” Conrad muttered under his breath, picking himself up and probing gingerly for bruises.

This kind of crap was just a fact of life onboard a starship. Given their speed of travel and the range of their sensors, if there was any debris in their path which was too large to be disintegrated by the nav lasers and too small to be spotted telescopically and plotted around, they had about ten seconds to get out of its way. With lateral thrusters belching fusion exhaust at one full gee, you could juke laterally by about half a kilometer in this length of time. And that was usually enough; it was the safety margins that really killed you, made you juke five or eight or ten kilometers instead.

If the thing you were avoiding was the size of a thumbnail or a particularly large grain of sand, and it was bearing right down the ship's centerline, then you really only had to dodge fifteen meters to let it skate past the edge of the hull with nary a scratch. But that did nothing to protect the sail, which was needed to slow down again at Barnard, and which was actually still giving them some fairly substantial push, even out here in the Oort Cloud, ten times as far from the sun as the orbit of Neptune.

And fuck if it was empty space. The last-minute dodges—“jukes” they were called—were happening ten or fifteen times a day. This was down substantially from the third-day peak of a hundred and four, but damned annoying nonetheless. Human bodies simply weren't meant to withstand this sort of sustained battering. Even null-gee hockey players would fax themselves a fresh body after every game, but here onboard ship, in the middle of operations, there generally wasn't time. For this reason, all nonessential personnel were being cycled—very willingly—into fax storage. The ship had been quiet before, but now it was deathly quiet. As the thrum of the nav engines faded away, the air resumed its stillness.

The skeleton crew—now a partial skeleton crew—actually had no particular use for Conrad Mursk. He didn't keep the engines or the fax machines running; he didn't navigate; didn't maintain or forecast or repair. Thus he was tempted—more tempted every day—to jump in the fax and let this part of the mission be over. Stored as data, he'd experience no time or sensation of any kind. He would simply step out of the fax in a hundred years, and everything would be great. But somebody did have to look after the crew as a whole, and anyway Conrad felt it was bad form for a first officer to go to sleep while there was still work being done.

So he dusted himself off, climbed gingerly back onto the railing, and slid four decks down to Engineering.

There, Money Izolo's crew of five was down to just himself and Peter Kolb. And Peter didn't look too happy. He was holding his eye and glaring balefully at a waldo hanging down from the ceiling. This was one of those things you could stick your arms into, to operate robotic arms inside one of the reactor cores. But it necessarily had some solid and angular parts, whose indentations were clearly visible in the flesh around Peter's eye.

“Hi, Petes,” Conrad said, pulling out the sketchplate which held his to-do list. (He was a big believer in lists; they had saved his life more than once during the Revolt, and were anyway vital in holding entropy at bay.) “You okay?”

“I think I popped my eyeball,” Peter complained.

“Popped it? No way.” Conrad immediately felt better about his own bruises, and guilty for whining about them, even to himself.

“He's fine,” Money said from across the room. He was staring intently into a holie display on one of the wall panels and waving a wellstone sketchplate at it to absorb the image, and presumably perform some calculation on it. “Quit clowning around, you. I need those cooling parameters updated.”

“No, seriously,” Peter insisted. “I'm hurt.”

“Let me see,” Conrad told Peter. And then, when Peter didn't pull his hand away, more firmly: “Let me see. That's an order.”

Reluctantly, Peter uncovered the wounded eye, and Conrad couldn't suppress a groan of disgust. “Eeew. Yuck.”

“Did I pop it?” Peter asked worriedly.

“You did something to it.” Truthfully, Conrad couldn't really tell what he was looking at. There wasn't a lot of blood, and as far as he could tell there was no eyeball jelly leaking out or anything, but something unpleasant had happened to the eyelid, and to the eye underneath. There were vertical gashes of pink and white where nothing like that was supposed to be, so that it barely looked like an eye at all.

“All right,” Money relented. “Go visit Stores and have yourself reprinted. But hurry back—I need those numbers or we're going to vent some irreplaceable coolant mass. Understand? Mass we'll have to do without for a hundred years, or maybe forever.”

“Yes, sir,” grumbled Peter, brushing past Conrad and hurrying out the door.

“You could be more sympathetic,” Conrad said.

It was an understatement, but Money just shrugged. “It's always something with that kid. Maybe he'll be more careful next time. Meanwhile, power demands on this fusion reactor are jumping around like spit on a heat sink, and the cooling system is not keeping up.”

“I'm surprised that isn't automated,” Conrad said. “You've got hypercomputers, right?”

“Well, yes and no. Newhope was designed with people in mind. There are built-in tasks for us, and of course there are always issues the designers didn't foresee. For example, this predictive cooling algorithm looks as though it was based on some kind of weather program, like for a domestic climate controller. It never has worked very well, and until we get it replaced, I'm using Peter.”

“I see.”

Money turned back to his panel for a moment, then looked up at Conrad again. “Was there something you needed?”

Conrad nodded, glancing once at his sketchplate for confirmation. “Yeah, but it's pretty much just a status report. I'm trying to stop by all the stations today that still have crew, and see how everyone's doing. Looks like I've got your answer, or part of it anyway.”

“Things could be easier here,” Money admitted.

“You have a lot of issues like this?”

He pursed his lips for a moment. “Oh, a few. Five or six. Keeps us busy enough.”

“Okay,” Conrad said, nodding and frowning with the false wisdom he had learned at leadership school. As probably the smartest of the former Blue Nudists, Money was not the sort to be ordered around. He needed a gentler touch, a bit of praise and persuasion. “So you're fully burdened. You don't anticipate freeing up anyone else for storage?”

“Not until the engines stop firing, no.” ¹

“Hmm.”

“Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.

“The comm antenna is another issue. We're already using the whole sail for this, so there's no room left to expand communications. As our distance from Earth increases, we'll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. We are supposed to be on our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or nearly.”

“Why so?”

Money shrugged. “Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is asymmetric. With no crew, you don't have to worry about it, and with a thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with statistics. But right now we've got almost as many fax machines as people, and it's getting to be a grind.”

“And here I've been taking them for granted,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Do we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life easier?”

“Yah,” Money said vaguely, “I don't know about that. Talk to your Chief of Stores. She's my main energy customer after propulsion.”

Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man, no longer holding his eye.

“Better?” Money asked him.

“Much,” Peter answered testily. “And don't ask me again for those cooling numbers. I'm on it.”

Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursing and glaring. She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine—the largest one in the ship's habitable compartments—with a bunch of tools and sensors and sketchplates spread out around her.

“Is this a bad time?” Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.

Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her little bubble of a world. “Oh. It's you. Hi.”

“Some trouble here?” he asked.

“The start of some trouble, I think.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “This is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I've run the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.”

“So the machine is slightly broken, and it'll only get worse over time?”

“Right.”

“Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?”

The look she gave him was hard. “I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me say that a print plate doesn't last forever, and the large ones tend to die more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance, it'll last for hundreds of years.”

“And that's what you're doing now? Routine maintenance?”

“I didn't say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes can't replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a snake's head swaying to improve the view.”

“So then,” Conrad said with some relief, “there's no danger of pulling the passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?”

To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic laugh, but good-humored just the same. “Unless they went in that way, no. What I'm doing right now is scrubbing behind the print plate's surface, bringing all marginal faxels up to full capacity. I don't know where this damage is coming from.”

“Probably cosmic rays,” Conrad told her. “We're seeing traces of it all over the ship. It's going to be a fact of life until we slow down and get back inside a large magnetic field of some sort. But you get cosmic rays on Earth, too. Is this sort of damage unusual? Have you seen it before?”

“Not unusual, no. Just more than I'm used to seeing.”

“Well,” Conrad said with a smirk, “you could always print another fax machine.”

He was joking with her. The print plate of a fax machine had, like, extradimensional quantum attributes that couldn't be stored or described atomically. People and oranges and even whole spaceships could be produced by fax machine, and most of the parts for another fax machine could be as well, but the print plate itself had to come from a special factory, and every square centimeter of it represented—according to rumor—a year's labor from a thousand patient elves. The amazing thing, when you thought about it, was how dirt-common these things had become even before the rise of the Queendom. By some accounts, as much as ten percent of the economy—both human and monetary—was involved in the production of fax machine print plates. Alas, that was pretty much everything Conrad knew on the subject.

What he said to Brenda was, “Are there programs to monitor this damage while we're all in storage?”

“Of course,” she said impatiently. “My crew and I will be pulled out if any of these machines degrade beyond a threshold value. But like I said, they've got a long life ahead of them. We take good care here.”

“So, do you anticipate going into storage yourself soon? Or releasing some of your people?”

In response, Brenda scowled and threw up her hands. “I don't know. Ask me when I'm finished with this! I'm going to look at all the other machines, too. Louis McGee is worthless, how about you store him?”

“He is on my roster,” Conrad confirmed.

“Good. Now leave me alone. Please. Sir.”

Conrad looked for Robert on the bridge, but found two of him in a service-core crawl space just forward of Engineering. Though the space was crowded and close, Conrad stuck his head in.

“Some trouble here, Astrogation?”

There was a thump.

“Oh, hell,” said one of the Roberts, rubbing his head. “Don't startle me like that. Yeah, it's the sweep radar. I've reconfigured the antenna, but now it needs more power. I'm trying to boost the range.”

“Can't you do that from the bridge?”

“There's a safety interlock,” said the other Robert. “Bertram's on the bridge right now, issuing commands, but there's got to be a human thumb on the control point here as well. All critical systems need at least two nonidentical operators to modify. Some of them require five.”

“Even the ship can't override it?”

“Especially, the ship can't override it. Isn't that right, Ship?”

A speaker appeared in the wall of the crawl space. “Absolutely, sir.” The voice was vaguely feminine, almost childlike. “I am completely at your command, and nothing could please me more. Of course I'm programmed that way, but feeling it is, I should think, a higher level of obedience.”

“So,” Robert prodded, “you enjoy your work, even when it consists of letting me tinker with your guts?”

“Immensely, sir, although I do hope you'll be careful.”

“Right, right. Warn me if I'm doing something stupid.”

“My programming demands it,” the ship confirmed. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the speaker was gone again, vanishing with the faint crackle of programmable matter operating at needlessly high speed.

Conrad personally didn't talk to the ship very much. The idea didn't bother him, exactly, but his first ship had been the pirate fetu'ula Viridity, whose only intelligent hardware had been a snotty fax machine. Not much of a conversationalist, and not much point in even trying. Over the years he'd trained on half a dozen other ships, some of them quite charming, but Conrad really didn't see the point in getting chummy. He didn't talk to houses, either. To its credit, Newhope seemed to sense this about him, and kept mostly silent in his presence. But it was just like Robert to have a personal relationship with the equipment.

“So, when you were on that neutronium barge, did you talk to it as well?”

Both Roberts smiled, and one said, “Not so much, no. Barges are funny that way; they're not really intended for crew, and I don't think Refuge ever really got used to having us there. It didn't matter how we talked to it or what we did, we were always kind of anomalous, a constant source of surprise and confusion. Of course, we weren't exactly authorized, which may have had something to do with it. But Newhope, why, she and I are friends.”

“You make friends with robots as well?” Generally speaking, robots had a kind of collective intelligence thing going; whatever thoughts they had in their wellmetal brains, they were shared and spread across the brains of nearby robots, or household hypercomputers, or anything else that might be handy. They could be shockingly intelligent, but with a sort of mindless, mechanistic quality just the same. Idiots savant. And when they appeared together in the same sentence, the terms “friendly” and “robot” had certain other connotations—sordid ones which a lesser man might take amiss.

But what Robert said was, “Ah, sir, you just don't know the right robots. Think of that one that follows King Bruno around. What is it, Hector? Hugo?”

“Oh, yeah. Hugo. I've met him. It.”

“Eerie, isn't it? There's nothing human about it, but it's definitely . . . there with you. More so than this ship, or any hypercomputer I've spoken with. I could be friends with a machine like that.”

“Bruno spent a hundred years training that one. And it's still not finished.”

Robert laughed. “Who among us is finished?”

“Hmm,” Conrad said. “So, this activity here . . . Will it take you long?”

Robert glanced briefly at his thumb, making sure it was still on the interlock switch, then looked back at Conrad. “You trying to hustle me into storage?”

“Something like that. Have you got a timeline?”

In the confines of the crawl space, Robert shrugged. “Two days for fine-tuning? A week? I'm just guessing. We don't really have to do this at all, but I thought it might smooth out the ride. We've got predictive algorithms trying to steer us at low thrust into minimum-density zones, so we don't have to spend all our time juking around dust grains, but unfortunately this is where astrogation starts to become a challenge.”

“How so?” Conrad had studied astrogation, along with a lot of other subjects, but it was one of the many things that had gone in one side of his head and straight out the other, leaving no impression at all. Conrad wasn't sure if he was a stupid man or not, but he knew, at least, when somebody else knew a subject better than he did. Which was most of the time, alas, but that realization itself was maybe not so stupid.

The nearer Robert wriggled in the crawl space, adjusting his position while keeping his thumb on the interlock. He gestured with his free hand. ² “There isn't any kind of fixed reference for where we are. Near a known object, yes, you can take some range measurements, but not out here in the middle of nowhere. So even where we have echo-ephemeris dust maps—which are extremely spotty out here, by the way—we can't say with any certainty where we are on the map. So we're still flying blind.”

And suddenly Conrad understood. “Ah, it's like driving a motorcar at night.”

“Hmm? A motorcar?”

“My father paves roads for a living. Well, maintains the paving, anyway. I used to do a lot of testing with him.”

“So,” Robert said, “you're in some sort of wheeled contraption then? Rolling along in the dark? With, like, searchlights shining out in front of you?”

Conrad nodded. “Right. And there's wildlife out in the country, and if you hit a deer or something it can bounce you right off the road. But you never know where the deer are going to be, and your headlights only shine so far, so the faster you drive, the less reaction time you have.”

“And the more violent your maneuvers have to be, when you suddenly see that deer in front of you. Okay, it's exactly like that. So I'm turning up the brightness on our searchlights.”

Just then, an alarm sounded, and Bertram Wang's voice echoed throughout the ship, calling out, “Collision avoidance! Brace for—”

The lurch was not terribly violent when it came. Maybe a hundred-meter juke, one-fifty, tops. But the sound of crashing equipment echoed down the ladder, from one or two decks up, and the sound of human cursing followed close behind it. Then, while Conrad and Robert looked at each other, came the slam slam bang of angry footsteps coming down the wellsteel rungs. Seconds later, Louis McGee appeared, throwing himself down in front of them and stomping up to the entrance of the crawl space.

“Goddamn it, Astrogation.” Louis seemed, for a moment, to be preparing to ask a question: Why can't you be more careful? Why can't you watch where we're going? Why don't you give us a little warning next time? But instead, he grabbed Robert by the foot, hauled him bodily out of the crawl space, and punched him hard in the stomach before Conrad could intervene.

“Security!” Conrad shouted at the walls, and the walls responded in the voice of Newhope: “Security alert, deck four service core.” And then Conrad was prying Louis off of Robert, with a head- and armlock he wasn't really sure would hold. But as Robert struggled to his feet, and as the other Robert wriggled free of the crawl space, their own efforts aided Conrad, and the three of them were able to restrain Louis effectively.

“You all right?” Conrad asked.

“No,” Louis said angrily. “I banged my fuffing head for the third time today.”

“I wasn't talking to you, numbskull,” Conrad barked. Louis was the third inventory officer, and had no business being out of storage this late, anyway.

“I'll be all right,” Robert said, a little breathlessly. “He mostly just surprised me. Well—uh!—maybe I'll step through a fax just to be safe.”

“You stupid ass,” Conrad said, smacking Louis across the top of the head. “Now I'm going to have to figure out a punishment. High space naval discipline, oh my little gods. You're probably going to have to be flogged, my friend. What would make you do something like this? Right in fuffing front of me?”

And with that, Louis started crying. “I want to go home. Oh, I want to go home.”

“Oh, brother,” Robert said wearily. “Here we go.”

Conrad was inclined to agree. They'd had their share of freakups onboard Viridity, and even occasionally onboard more civilized craft. It was only a matter of time before they had some here. A lot of people didn't take well to space—the distances, the dangers, the isolation. And no one had asked to be here, not really.

“I've got a big brother,” Louis whimpered. “He's forty-nine years older than me, and he always knows what to do. But it's taking three weeks to get his replies now, and it's only going to get longer. Three months, three years, twelve years when we finally get to Barnard. What good is a big brother if it takes him twelve years to give advice?”

“Just calm down,” Conrad told him. “Take deep breaths.”

Just then Security, in the person of an unescorted Ho Ng, came clanging down the ladder. He surveyed the scene, glancing dispassionately from face to face before meeting Conrad's gaze. “What happened?”

“Freakup,” Conrad said. “Escort him to storage, please. We'll worry about treatment options sometime in the future. Meanwhile, just get him out of here.”

Ho pursed his lips, studying Louis for a long moment. “What did he do, sir?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It does if we want valid security and psych statistics. Did he damage equipment?”

“No,” Conrad said. “He threw a punch.”

Ho considered that. His eyes settled on Robert, noting the gut-pained kink in his stance. “Assaulting an officer. Out here that's a flogging offense.”

“Only if I say so,” Conrad corrected. “Or Xmary does. There are extenuating circumstances, and in my opinion Mr. McGee here is not fully responsible for his actions. Do you want him flogged, Astrogation?”

“No, I forgive him,” Robert said.

Conrad nodded. “Right. Louis? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“I want to go home. I didn't want to be here, I was never part of the revolt. I was just, you know, there at the time. Can you fax me home, sir? Please?”

“Oh, for crying . . . Louis, you work in the inventory. You know as well as I do that we haven't got the data rate to transmit a person. Take some mental notes, if you like, and we'll mail them back for appendment to your archive. Do you want to be locally erased?”

“No!”

“Then you're pretty much stuck here, right? Ho, just take him.”

“With pleasure, sir.” Ho grabbed Louis' arm and roughly hauled him toward the ladder.

“Gently, Security,” Conrad warned. He knew Ho from their pirate days, and trusted him about as well as he trusted a starving dog. Security was a real interesting job choice for him, the result not of a vote but of a writ issued by King Bascal shortly after his coronation. “Ho likes responsibility,” Bascal had said at the time. “It's good for him, and that's good for us. You want him idle instead? You want him tuning the engines?”

But as Ho and Louis ascended the ladder together—not stopping at the nearest fax machine but continuing all the way to the top—Conrad heard the echoes of Louis' yelping and squawking for a long time, and knew that Ho would gladly break an arm or two if the opportunity arose.

“Jesus Christ and all the little gods,” he said to Robert. “I need to get my ass into storage pretty quick here. Maybe I should punch you myself.”