The Death of the Universe: Ghost Kingdom: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 2)

by Brandon Q Morris

  He pressed against the lid, but it would no longer open. He cried out, but no one could hear him out there. Kepler froze like he’d never frozen before. His lips trembled, his entire body became stiff. Then there was only blackness.

  Cycle HW 6.1, Gigadyson

  He must be dead. Kepler was breathing deeply, but his rib cage wasn’t moving. It felt like a giant was sitting on it. He moved his toes. They reacted normally. Shouldn’t he be suffocating? He couldn’t smell anything either. He’d expected an aroma of machine oil and stale air, but everything seemed to be completely sterile.

  Maybe he should open his eyes. Kepler activated his vision. The light in the room was a bright white. Two robots with black skins were hanging opposite him. He lifted his arm and held his hand in front of his face. It had six identical fingers consisting of five segments. These fingers must be powerful, and at the same time extremely sensitive. Oh right, he was a robot. It had taken him a while to realize that last time, too. Kepler was annoyed, which would typically increase his heart rate. But his body didn’t react and his consciousness immediately adapted to it. He remained calm.

  Last time he had visited here another robot had waved at him. Kepler waited to see if anything would happen. There was nothing but a humming sound. That was unusual, too. In every ship and every space station he’d been on in his long life, the life support system hissed constantly. It was a background noise that was always there but which he automatically blocked out. So he noticed when it wasn’t there.

  But why did he hear anything at all? He analyzed the air in the room, just by thinking about it. Some numbers appeared at the edge of his vision. The room was filled with nitrogen at half the normal pressure. Presumably it was optimized for the machines stored here. They had to remain operational for millennia, so a vacuum and low temperatures would probably be harmful.

  He looked at his legs. He was in the same robot model as last time. He slid the upper legs in and out. Then he took a step forward and looked around. It wasn’t the same control station as the last time. If it was, the remains of the autonomous unit would still be lying in the corner.

  What was supposed to happen next? He was on his own. There must at least be a shuttle to get him to the surface of the Gigadyson. Kepler turned to the left, like last time, but behind that door was just an unused storage room. He must have woken up on the other side last time. What had been on the left must now be on the right.

  The door on the right didn’t have a handle. Roughly at the height where a handle would be, but toward the middle, were six holes. They were the right size for his fingers. He stretched out his right hand and pushed his fingers into the indents. Nothing happened at first. Then something pricked his neck and the door sprang outward. A gust of air unexpectedly hit him from behind. Nitrogen was rushing out of the pressurized room.

  Kepler stumbled onto the terrace in front of him. It was two meters wide. He was just able to steady himself before he reached the edge of it. It had no railing. Beyond it was infinite space. He thought about his near catastrophe in the interior of the Gigadyson. If he had fallen into space, would someone have brought him back to the station again this time? He didn’t need to worry about radiation pressure from any sun here. The nearest stars were far too distant.

  Kepler felt at his hip and confirmed that there was a safety line hanging off it. He bent down. Around the edge of the terrace at ground level ran a pipe, onto which he was able to clip his line. He turned to his left and walked around the station. The shuttle was waiting next to the station. It was floating motionless in space. There was no physical connection between the station and the shuttle, which appeared to be completely autonomous.

  How was he supposed to get to it? He’d have to jump. But to do that he’d need to detach the safety line. He hesitated at first, but then he unclipped himself. He should be able to reach the eight-meter-long shuttle from only one meter away! Kepler tried to bend his knees, but he didn’t have any knee joints. He’d have to use some other technique. Ah! He bent forward, telescoped his thighs down into his lower legs and then propelled himself from that position. Unfortunately it functioned better than expected. He rose up at a 45-degree angle and was in danger of flying past the shuttle. But he still had the safety line. He whipped it so that it wrapped itself around a stringer on the shuttle. The line became taut. It slackened again immediately, but the tension had altered his course. The bodywork of the shuttle came within reach. He clawed at the hard material. His fingers broke through the thin sheet metal. He’d made it.

  Now he just needed to get the vehicle to transport him to the surface. Ada had taken charge of that last time, and he had not paid attention. Stupid. Kepler clipped himself on, then examined the shuttle. There were three standing positions on the left and right-hand sides, which must be intended for robots like himself. At the back was the propulsion unit. It didn’t pivot, so the shuttle couldn’t land on objects with normal gravity. It also had no cabin, so it couldn’t accommodate humans.

  Directly behind the propulsion unit Kepler found a vertical panel with six holes, in front of which was a comfortable amount of space for one robot. The six indents were similar to the ones in the outer door of the control station. He pushed the fingers of his right hand into them. Again, he felt an electric shock in his neck. He touched the painful spot with his left hand, but there was nothing there.

  A graphical user interface appeared in his field of view. The cursor was synchronized with his eyes, so he focused on the bullseye at the bottom right. The image changed and appeared to be waiting for a number to be entered. Kepler searched for a virtual keyboard but there was none. Suddenly he saw a one, then a zero. Ah! He made a conscious effort to think about the coordinates that had been recorded in Zhenyi’s video. They replaced the one and the zero. Now, how was he supposed to launch? He looked for a corresponding symbol. Maybe he just needed to think about it?

  “Go!”

  The surest way to think something was to say it out loud. His inertia jerked him backward. The thrusters must have started up. He checked that his line was still attached. Then he turned around. If he hadn’t noticed from the acceleration that the shuttle was moving, he wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking at the propulsion unit either. The hot combustion gases were invisible in the darkness of the cosmos—at least in the optical spectrum. In infrared the hot drive was visible a long way off.

  The shuttle moved away from the control station. It pivoted 180 degrees so that the thrusters were no longer accelerating it, but rather braking. It slowly descended into orbit.

  Cycle HW 6.2, Gigadyson

  The descent took longer than last time. The whole time, he was half expecting to be shot down in the shuttle. The thieves hadn’t wasted any time with the autonomous units. But nothing happened. Anyway, it was very likely that Zhenyi—or the person that he assumed to be Zhenyi—had moved on long ago. But, to be safe, he landed the shuttle a couple of honeycomb sections away from the maintenance shaft.

  Kepler unclipped his safety line. He didn’t need it here on the surface because there was a low level of gravity, enough that he couldn’t accidentally escape it. To get a better view of his surroundings, he stood on the stringers that formed the highest point of the shuttle. The Gigadyson was quite desolate. Its surface appeared to stretch infinitely in all directions. The horizon was a long way off. A very dark gray dominated here, and that was true for the whole spectrum. Even the honeycomb structures didn’t break up the monotony—they were too perfectly uniform. To really get a sense of the Gigadyson, you had to see it from a great distance.

  He sprang down from the shuttle and landed about three meters away. Why had he even come here? It had been a snap decision. At any rate, there were no traces left of Zhenyi. Kepler thought back to the simulation of the movement of the sphere. He had detected a slight imbalance. Maybe it had occurred during the last visit by the purported Zhenyi? If she had deposited large masses at precisely the right locations, for example, that
could cause the changes he’d observed.

  They weren’t yet dangerous, but if these disturbances continued to increase in number, they could destroy the sphere much more efficiently than an explosion. The consequences for humanity would be dire. The tsunami of energy that would break over the delicate worlds nearby would be the least of their worries. A much weightier problem would be the fact that humanity would lose its most important energy source in an instant.

  But it hadn’t come to that yet. The sphere was still a long way away from collapsing. Kepler examined ‘his’ robot’s instruments. Maybe he could find out whether the structure of the Gigadyson had been altered in this area, too. Ideally he’d like to measure the thickness of the sphere. But he didn’t have a suitable measuring device. The robot had every type of sensor possible, but he couldn’t go much deeper than a meter with those—and the sphere was at least thirty meters thick.

  He telescoped his upper legs downward until his hands reached the ground, and then felt the surface. It was unusually smooth. Shouldn’t there be more micro-meteorite impacts? He went back to the shuttle and zoomed his vision to view the surface of the vehicle as though through a microscope. The material it was made of was definitely no less stable than the surface of the Gigadyson, but it had countless tiny scars.

  The first piece of evidence, he noted in his records.

  What did scientists do when they wanted to examine the interior of a planet? Rather than digging a hole, they sent sound waves into it. He could use this procedure, too. The inner surface of the shell should reflect the sound. He would be able to draw conclusions about the structure of the shell based on the strength of the reflected waves. It would be practical to have an assistant for this, because he would have to knock as hard as possible at one point on the shell, and at the same time measure the reflected sound from a little further away.

  He called up the schematics of the robot body, and found the solution. The robot consisted of two parts that were joined above the hips. Presumably he could equip it with a different lower body, something with six legs or a drive train. The connection between the two parts was a pluggable spinal cord. So he could easily divide himself in half and be his own assistant. But there was still one problem. His intelligence was primarily situated in the upper half, and there was no radio connection he could use to command one of his legs to stamp rhythmically on the ground.

  So, he’d have to deal with that first. He gave his lower body a command to stamp with the right foot every 15 seconds until the command was rescinded. The leg obeyed. It was a strange feeling, as though his limbs had become independent. He had to be careful not to interrupt the movement with his thoughts, because the connection was still there. So, the first thing he needed to do was disconnect the cable from his lower body. He just had to reach into a hollow in his left side.

  Now things were precarious, because while he was separating his upper and lower body parts, his stability was endangered. His upper body only had a third of the mass of his lower body, but he couldn’t let his legs tip over or they wouldn’t continue the stamping. Kepler systematically unplugged a total of six connections. His upper body was now sitting very lightly on his hips. He grabbed his hips with both hands and lifted up his upper body. He calculated. Two centimeters should be enough. Kepler gave his upper body a slight shove forward with his arms. Due to Newton’s laws of motion, this also gave his lower body a push backward, but he had calculated the force so that it would stabilize itself and remain standing.

  It worked. His upper body sailed slowly down without bumping into the lower part. His lower body was still standing, and the right leg was continuing to perform the commanded movement every 15 seconds. However, the lower body was gradually moving out of position. He hadn’t thought of the fact that removing the upper body would alter the dynamics. With each stamp of the right foot, his legs were now wandering one millimeter forward. After about 2000 millimeters they would bump into the shuttle and topple over. That meant he had about 500 minutes to take his measurements—okay, that’s more than eight hours, Kepler calculated with a mental sigh of relief. That should definitely be enough.

  Now he needed to choose a suitable measuring position. The honeycomb two sections over seemed ideal. He’d have to reach it without his legs. But he had strong arms. Kepler set his fingers on the ground a short distance in front of his robot torso. Then he pressed into the surface to lift the torso, swinging it forward between his arms to land a bit ahead of his planted fingers. It worked much like a person ‘walking’ with crutches, lifting, and landing on, the base of the robot’s torso-section in lieu of feet. He repeated this movement until he’d reached the first dividing wall. Lucky the gravity was so low here!

  He repeated the same tactic, but with more power from his fingers. That allowed him to bring himself up to the top of the steep wall. From there he cast a glance back. He had to laugh.

  About 20 meters away was a lonely pair of legs, with one leg stamping repeatedly like a modern-day Rumpelstiltskin. Turning his head, however, had caused him to lose his balance and he slid back down the same side of the wall.

  Shit! Now he’d have to start again. The second climb was successful, and he realized it was quite fun, actually, heaving his body over to the other side and then letting himself slide down. He decided to cross one more section and then start measuring. He still had more than seven hours.

  Kepler pressed his ear against the ground. The acoustic sensor didn’t look like a human ear, but it functioned similarly—only better. It could measure vibrations traveling through the air or, like here, through the ground. Every 15 seconds it picked up a knocking sound. He wouldn’t have been able to do this with a human body, because the intensity of the vibration was minimal. He also wouldn’t have had the necessary time resolution, because what he was hearing wasn’t the knocking itself, but the reflected vibration.

  The same sound reached him multiple times in microsecond intervals, each time reflected from a different surface. He could differentiate between the first, second, and third maintenance shafts. The reflection from the inner surface of the sphere took the longest. But to get precise values he had to vary his position. The vibration took a different route each time. Kepler recorded the measurements until he had sufficient readings. Now he just had to calculate the distance from his ear to the interior of the sphere.

  The result was shocking. There was one meter missing. Someone must have patiently worked to remove an entire meter of material, either here on top or from the interior of the sphere. Presumably it had happened up here, under the watchful eyes of the autonomous units. That would explain why there were no micrometeorite impacts.

  Kepler entered the results into the Gigadyson simulation. If a similar amount of material were to be removed from at least 820 different locations, the sphere would become unstable—yet no one would notice it happening, because everything still looked the same as before. Care had even been taken to remove a meter from the top of the walls between the sections. What kind of treacherous plan was this? Who concocted it and, above all, why? What did it have to do with Zhenyi? He had to warn the Convention. He could do that from the shuttle.

  Kepler started heading back. Now he regretted having allowed himself so much time at the beginning. On the other hand, a few hours wouldn’t make much difference now. The criminals were probably manipulating the Gigadyson somewhere else entirely. They weren’t magicians. They would be found and prosecuted. Kepler hoped desperately that Zhenyi wasn’t involved.

  The top of the shuttle came into view. He climbed up the next wall. From two meters up he could see the section in which the shuttle was standing. Everything looked peaceful. He was still alone. He was just about to let himself slide down when he realized something was different. His legs were gone. How was that possible?

  He was sure that this was where he’d left them, two meters away from the shuttle. Yes, they had been moving slowly out of position, due to the stamping, but not more than a millimeter ea
ch time. He scrambled around the shuttle as quickly as he could. There was no trace of his lower body. That just couldn’t be! The legs didn’t have the intelligence to march off on their own. He had to look for them! They couldn’t have left this honeycomb section. They’d never manage to get over the two-meter wall on their own! And yet they weren’t here.

  Maybe he should just ignore it. He’d get into the shuttle and fly to the control station. From there he could inform the Convention about what he’d discovered. Kepler turned toward the shuttle. It was standing on six legs like a giant insect. He had to get up onto the platform. That was the only way he could launch the shuttle. But it was more than two meters above him.

  This wouldn’t have been a problem with the legs, but how would he get his upper body up there? He could cling onto the belly of the shuttle like a parasite. His fingers were strong enough. But the vehicle couldn’t be controlled from there. He had to get up on top. Kepler surveyed the walls of the honeycomb. They were too far away for him to dare to jump from them. He tried it from where he was standing. He had to push off with his arms. But as soon as he lifted them up to grab onto the shuttle, the movement shunted him in the opposite direction and he landed a little further away from the shuttle.

  No. The whole idea of leaving without his legs was out of the question. His lower body couldn’t have simply disappeared. There must be someone else at work here. Even if he somehow managed to launch, he wouldn’t be safe for some time. He could be shot down. He had to solve the problem of his missing legs. After that he could worry about his departure. There was no one to be seen anywhere near the shuttle, but that didn’t mean anything. Kepler crept to the edge of the honeycomb. His goal was to reach the maintenance shaft. That was where Zhenyi had last been recorded by the autonomous unit’s camera.