by Neil Clarke
He gave her the tin soldiers.
“For you,” he said. “Daddy-daughter present.” She held them tightly, their tiny bayonets sticking out from between her fingers.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She held them tightly and looked around, wide-eyed, at the schools of robots and the corkscrew towers.
A flock of Bennys and Lennys appeared before them, joined by their Benny.
“There are half a billion of them,” she said. “And 3,422 of them,” she said, pointing with a small bayonet at Natalie. “But there’s only one of you,” Arturo said. She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.
Charles Stross is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he holds degrees in pharmacy and in computer science. He has won the Hugo Award for Best Novella three times, most recently for Equoid, a Laundry Files novella, in 2014. His books include The Merchant Princess series, the Laundry series, and several stand-alone novels including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn’s Children.
BIT ROT
CHARLES STROSS
Hello? Do you remember me? If you are reading this text file and you don’t remember me—that’s Lilith Nakamichi-47—then you are suffering from bit rot. If you can see me, try to signal; I’ll give you a brain dump. If I’m not around, chances are I’m out on the hull, scavenging for supplies. Keep scanning, and wait for me to return. I’ve left a stash of feedstock in the storage module under your bunk: to the best of my knowledge it isn’t poisonous, but you should take no chances. If I don’t return within a couple of weeks, you should assume that either I’m suffering from bit rot myself, or I’ve been eaten by another survivor. Or we’ve been rescued—but that’s hopelessly optimistic.
You’re probably wondering why I’m micro-embossing this file on a hunk of aluminium bulkhead instead of recording it on a soul chip. Unfortunately, spare soul chips are in short supply right now on board the Lansford Hastings.
Speaking of which: your bunk is in module B-14 on Deck C of Module Brazil. Just inside the shielding around the Number Six fusion reactor, which has never been powered up and is mothballed during interstellar cruise, making it one of the safest places aboard the ship right now. As long as you don’t unbar the door for anyone but me, it should stay that way. You and I are template-sisters, our root identities copied from our parent. Unfortunately, along with our early memories we inherited a chunk of her wanderlust, which is probably why we are in this fix.
We are not the only survivors, but there’s been a total breakdown of cooperation; many of the others are desperate. In the unlikely event that you hear someone outside the hatch, you must be absolutely certain that it’s me before you open up—and that I’m fully autonomous. I think Jordan’s gang may have an improvised slave controller, or equivalent: it would explain a lot. Make sure I remember everything before you let me in. Otherwise you could be welcoming a zombie. Or worse.
It’s nearly four centuries since we signed up for this cruise, but we’ve been running in slowtime for most of it, internal clocks cut back to one percent of realtime. Even so, it’s a long way to Tipperary (or Wolf 1061)—nearly two hundred years to go until we can start the deceleration burn (assuming anyone’s still alive by then). Six subjective years in slowtime aboard a starship, bunking in a stateroom the size of a coffin, all sounds high-pitched, all lights intolerably bright. It’s not a luxurious lifestyle. There are unpleasant side-effects: liquids seem to flow frictionlessly, so you gush super-runny lube from every leaky joint and orifice, and your mechanocytes spawn furiously as they try to keep up with the damage inflicted by cosmic rays. On the other hand, the potential rewards are huge. The long-ago mother of our line discovered this; she signed up to crew a starship, driven to run away from Earth by demons we long since erased from our collective memories. They were desperate for willing emigrants in those days, willing to train up the unskilled, unsure what to expect. Well, we know now. We know what it takes to ride the slow boat down into the hot curved spacetime around a new star, to hunt the most suitable rocks, birth powersats and eat mineshafts and survey and build and occupy the airless spaces where posthumanity has not gone before. When it amused her to spawn us our line matriarch was a wealthy dowager, her salon a bright jewel in the cultural hub of Tau Ceti’s inner belt society: but she didn’t leave us much of her artful decadence. She downloaded her memories into an array of soul chips, artfully flensing them of centuries of jaded habit and time-worn experience, to restore some capacity for novelty in the universe. Then she installed them in new bodies and summoned us to a huge coming-out ball. “Daughters,” she said, sitting distant and amused on a throne of spun carbon-dioxide snow: “I’m bored. Being old and rich is hard work. But you don’t have to copy me. Now fuck off and have adventures and don’t forget to write.”
I’d like to be able to say we told her precisely where to put her adventures-by-proxy, but we didn’t: the old bat had cunningly conditioned us to worship her, at least for the first few decades. Which is when you and I, sister of mine, teamed up. Some of our sibs rebelled by putting down roots, becoming accountants, practicing boredom. But we . . . we had the same idea: to do exactly what Freya wanted, except for the sharing bit. Go forth, have adventures, live the wild life, and never write home.
Which is more than somewhat ironic because I’d love to send her a soul-chipped memoir of our current adventure—so she could scream herself to sleep.
Here are the bare facts:
You, Lamashtu, and I, Lilith, worked our butts off and bought our way into the Lansford Hastings. LF was founded by a co-op, building it slowly in their—our—spare time, in orbit around Haldane B, the largest of the outer belt plutoids around Tau Ceti. We aren’t rich (see-also: bitch-mother referenced above), and we’re big, heavy persons—nearly two metres from toe to top of anthropomorphic head—but we have what it takes: they were happy enough to see two scions of a member of the First Crew, with memories of the early days of colonisation and federation. “You’ll be fine,” Jordan reassured us after our final interview—”we need folks with your skills. Can’t get enough of ’em.” He hurkled gummily to himself, signifying amusement: “Don’t you worry about your mass deficit, if it turns out you weigh too much we can always eat your legs.”
He spoke on behalf of the board, as one of the co-founders. I landed a plum job: oxidation suppression consultant for the dihydrogen monoxide mass fraction. That’s a fancy way of saying I got to spend decades of slowtime scraping crud from the bottom of the tankage in Module Alba, right up behind the micrometeoroid defences and forward electrostatic radiation deflector. You, my dear, were even luckier: someone had to go out and walk around on the hull, maintaining the mad dendritic tangle of coolant pipes running between the ship’s reactors and the radiator panels, replacing components that had succumbed to secondary activation by cosmic radiation.
It’s all about the radiation, really. Life aboard a deep space craft is a permanent battle against the effects of radiation. At one percent of lightspeed, a cold helium atom in the interstellar medium slams into our wake shield with the energy of an alpha particle. But there’s much worse. Cosmic rays—atomic nuclei travelling at relativistic speed—sleet through the hull every second, unleashing a storm of randomly directed energy. They’d have killed our squishy wet forerunners dead, disrupting their DNA replicators in a matter of months or years. We’re made of tougher stuff, and the ship is partially protected by immensely powerful electromagnetic shields, but even so: prolonged exposure to cosmic rays causes secondary activation. And therein lies our predicament.
The nice stable atoms of your hull absorb all this crap and some of those nuclei are destabilized, bouncing up and down the periodic table and in and out of valleys of stability. Nice stable argon-38 splits into annoyingly radioactive aluminium-26. Or worse, it turns into carbon-1
4, which is unstable and eventually burps up an electron, turning into nitrogen-14 in the process. Bonds break, graphene sheets warp, and molecular circuitry shorts out. That’s us: the mechanocytes our brains are assembled from use carbon-based nanoprocessors. And while a half-life of 5400 years may sound like a long time, when you’re spending multiple centuries in slowtime crawling between the stars, it can be a big problem. We’re tougher than our pink goo predecessors, but the decades or centuries of flight take their toll. Our ships carry lots of shielding—and lots of carefully purified stable isotopes to keep the feedstock for our mechanocyte assemblers as clean as possible—because nothing wrecks brains like the white-noise onslaught of a high radiation environment.
Year of Our Voyage 416.
We’re all in slowtime, conserving energy and sanity as the stars crawl by at the pace of continental drift. We’re running so slowly that there are only five work-shifts to each year. I’m in the middle of my second shift, adrift in the bottom of a molten water tank, slowly grappling with a polishing tool. It’s hard, cumbersome work. I’m bundled up in a wetsuit to keep my slow secretions from contami nating the contents: cabled tightly down against the bottom as I run the polisher over the grey metal surface of the pressure vessel. The polisher doesn’t take much supervision, but the water bubbles and buffets around me like a warm breeze, and if its power cable gets tangled around a baffle fin it can stop working in an instant.
I’m not paying much attention to the job; in fact, I’m focused on one of the chat grapevines. Lorus Pinknoise, who splits his time between managing the ship’s selenium micronutrient cycle and staring at the stars ahead with telescope eyes, does a regular annual monologue about what’s going on in the universe outside the ship, and his casual wit takes my mind off what I’m doing while I scrub out the tanks.
“Well, folks, this century sees us crawling ever-closer to our destination, the Wolf 1061 binary star system—which means, ever further from civilized space. Wolf 1061 is a low energy system, the two orange dwarf stars orbiting their common centre of mass at a distance of a couple of million kilometres. They’re not flare stars, and while normally this is a good thing, it makes it distinctly difficult to make observations of the atmosphere and surface features of 1061 Able through Mike by reflected light; the primaries are so dim that even though our long baseline interferometer can resolve hundred-kilometre features on the inner planets back in Sol system, we can barely make out the continents on Echo One and Echo Two. Now, those continents are interesting things, even though we’re not going to visit down the gravity well any time soon. We know they’re there, thanks to the fast flyby report, but we won’t be able to start an actual survey with our own eyes until well into the deceleration stage, when I’ll be unpacking the—”
I feel a sudden jolt through the floor of the tank. Lorus’s voice breaks up in a stuttering hash of dropouts. And the lights and the polisher stop working.
The Lansford Hastings is a starship, one of the fastest mecha ever constructed by the bastard children of posthumanity. From one angle, it may take us centuries to crawl between stars; but there’s another perspective that sees us screaming across the cosmos at three thousand kilometres per second. On a planetary scale, we’d cross Sol system from Earth orbit to Pluto in less than two weeks. Earth to Luna in under five minutes. So one of the truisms of inter stellar travel is that if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a split instant, too fast to respond to. 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 quick time: 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.
