The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  The Ouroboros Wave

  © 2002 Jyouji Hayashi

  Originally published in Japan

  by Hayakawa Publishing, Inc.

  English translation © 2010 VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover illustration by Tomoyuki Fukutome

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by

  VIZ Media, LLC

  295 Bay Street

  San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.haikasoru.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-4055-9

  Haikasoru eBook edition, November 2010

  CONTENTS

  The Ouroboros Wave

  The Riddle of Rapushinupurukuru

  Hydra’s Ice

  The Dragons of Europa

  The Voice of Eingana

  The Wings of Caliban

  Afterword

  About the Author

  HAPPENSTANCE is necessity in disguise.

  A proverb is often borne out by events, and the discovery of the black hole humankind would eventually name Kali was one of these events. If Dr. Ochiai hadn’t entered erroneous coordinates for her X-ray observation satellite, its sensors would never have focused on a seemingly empty part of the heavens. Kali would have remained undiscovered, at least for the time being.

  But happenstance was not content with fortuitous discovery. Kali was an astonishingly small black hole, about the same mass as Mars, emitting X-rays with clockwork regularity for reasons unknown. It was purest chance that the satellite turned its collimator toward Kali at the right moment to detect its emissions.

  Kali may have been as old as the universe itself; the Big Bang gave birth to countless black holes. The smallest of these objects evaporated, and in the billions of years since the universe came into being, every black hole with less than a trillion kilograms of mass had disappeared. Kali, however, was six hundred billion times more massive.

  At first it was just another object of interest for astronomers. But when those members of the human species who had already begun to make their home in space realized that this black hole was on a collision course with the Sun, they took action. Kali’s orbit would be changed. Its energy would even be harnessed for humanity’s benefit.

  These actions sprang from necessity. Humans were not yet able to perceive meaning in the chance events that followed in necessity’s wake.

  THE OUROBOROS WAVE

  A.D. 2123

  1

  THE FUNERAL BEGAN as the sun climbed above the ring’s horizon. Moments earlier, East Platform had been in utter darkness. Now that smooth metallic surface, fifty meters broad, flashed into brilliance as light reflected from it. And the sun kept rising.

  The shadows of the astronauts stabbed out across the platform’s two hundred meters. As the sun climbed higher, each shadow withdrew into its owner like a living organism. Twelve minutes later the sun was at the zenith. For a few seconds the shadows disappeared. Then they began reaching out in the opposite direction.

  This orientation kept solar energy distributed uniformly across Ouroboros, a revolving ring more than four thousand kilometers across. Still, this was a funeral, and the mourners took notice. The sun rose, fell, and rose again in less than an hour, whispering of death and resurrection.

  “Yesterday—September 13, 2123—our friend and colleague, the brilliant astronomer Dr. Graham Chapman, was transformed into a celestial object.”

  Catherine Sinclaire had been a close associate of Dr. Chapman in System Control. As she finished speaking, a bright ring of gas floated into view over the heads of the mourners. At the same moment, the sun reached the zenith. The three-dimensional image dimmed in the sunlight.

  The hologram showed the black hole at the center of Ring Mega-Structure Ouroboros, over two thousand kilometers away. The accretion disk pulsed with energy as it spiraled into Kali, glowing with fission reactions. As Chapman fell toward the event horizon his mass was converted to energy.

  Catherine’s partner Tatsuya Kawanishi watched the hologram on his web, a multifunction computing and communications device. Kali was only a few millimeters across, but Chapman’s disappearance into the singularity couldn’t be viewed with the naked eye.

  The ultimate goal of AADD—the Artificial Accretion Disk Development association—was to create an accretion disk around Kali as a source of harvestable energy. But this disk was different. It was Graham Chapman himself. Cosmic gravitational and tidal forces had transfigured him.

  AADD had neither priests nor any need for them. Funerals did not comfort the spirits of the dead. They gave closure to the living. AADD funerals did not include religion, and AADD members did not stake their fate on a deity. Fate was something to be shaped with one’s wits. The awe felt by a single human confronting the immensity of space far surpassed any religious teaching. No one here was arrogant enough to imagine that a deity would trouble itself with the affairs of humanity. Such a being might exist or it might not. It made little difference.

  East Platform was the only place on the ring large enough for close to a hundred mourners. It was also the scene of the accident. Until yesterday, two cylindrical habitat modules had stood here, awaiting the start of full-scale construction. But the crews had not yet arrived, otherwise there would have been more casualties. Now only fragments of the modules remained on the expanse of bare metal.

  Chapman’s body, still in its space suit, had struck the modules, demolishing them. Luckily the structures on the inner side of the ring had escaped damage. But here on the outer surface, only the laser cannons standing guard against meteor strikes—each of the ring’s four platforms had two—were unscathed. For now, the cannons were off-line.

  All of the AADD division chiefs—men and women responsible for the construction of Ouroboros—were here, clad in hard-shell space suits. No one was recognizable; they communicated using their webs.

  In spite of the anonymity imposed by the space suits, the somber mood on the platform was palpable. Chapman had been one of System Control’s senior personnel, and most of those present had had at least some contact with him. Several mourners, including Catherine and Tatsuya, had been very close to him. Even those who hadn’t known Chapman well were shocked by the accident. His death marked the first fatality on the Chandrasekhar Station construction project.

  One after another, Chapman’s friends shared their impressions of the deceased. He had hardly been a saint, but his virtues had outweighed his flaws. He had sometimes been hasty in judgment, but his achievements spoke for themselves. As the mourners recounted their memories, a shared sense emerged. Dr. Graham Chapman had been a human being, neither hero nor icon.

  It was then that the mourners realized the funeral was over.

  AADD DID NOT FIT the usual image of a corporation. There were responsibilities and functions, but no rank or hierarchy. This alone made it difficult for Terrans to understand.

  AADD was a collective of teams. Each team had a functional specialty and was independent, coming together with other teams as needed. Chandrasekhar Station—Ouroboros was only the first stage—was a typical example. The project teams were autonomous, but in the minds of their members, everything tied back to AADD. The picture was further blurred by the constant migration of specialists between teams. It wasn’t unusual for teams to merge and divide again, amoebalike.

  Dr. Chapman was typical of AADD’s senior members. An astronomer by profession, he had also had deep expertise in data processing and artificial intelligence. He, Catherine, and Tatsuya had shared overall responsibility for System Control.

  Of course, AADD operated this way for a reason, just as t
here were reasons for the distrust it had earned from the people of Earth.

  The singularity around which Chandrasekhar Station was being constructed had come to be known as Kali. In 2100, an orbiting observatory had detected a source of bizarre X-ray emissions. Kali was a tremendous discovery: a tiny black hole with roughly the mass of Mars, only a few dozen AUs from Earth.

  Soon after Kali was discovered, the Black Hole Reconnaissance Group of COSPAD, the UN’s Cosmic Space Development Agency, was formed as a dedicated observation group. It was BHRG that first proposed the artificial accretion disk development plan. It then dissolved itself, only to immediately reemerge as AADD. That was in 2120.

  BHRG quickly discovered something unusual about Kali: it had a high probability of colliding with the Sun in anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand years. The lack of precision in the estimate was due to Kali’s size. Calculating its orbital elements by standard methods was dauntingly difficult, but computer simulations confirmed that at some point the black hole was destined to fall into the Sun.

  BHRG’s proposal was to shift Kali out of its collision course and onto a trajectory that would make it a satellite of Uranus. At the same time, placing an artificial accretion disk around Kali would meet all of the solar system’s energy requirements for as long as anyone was willing to guess.

  The concept met with little interest at first; few considered it even feasible. Kali would not fall into the Sun for centuries, maybe even for thousands of years. It was hard to see it as an immediate threat. There was also little consensus concerning the physical effect of a tiny black hole colliding with the Sun. BHRG’s proposal seemed dead on arrival.

  Yet the scientists behind it were nothing if not determined. All of BHRG’s original members were astronomers, but theoretical physicists and others soon began to join, forming a network that stretched throughout the solar system—a network of experts from the wide range of fields that would ultimately be needed for the construction of an artificial accretion disk. A development group quickly formed, with BHRG as its nucleus. Only a few of its members hailed from Earth, but they made up for their limited numbers in quality. As the group expanded across the solar system, membership expanded beyond the scientific and engineering community to include economists, psychologists, media specialists, and others. Ultimately AADD emerged as the official representative of this unofficial network.

  This was the notion of AADD’s foundation accepted by most Terrans. The reality was different.

  Long before AADD was founded, Mars settlers were building a flexible, project-driven society starkly different from Earth’s hierarchical class systems. Terrans tended to think the UN created BHRG, which then spawned AADD. In truth, the two groups were both born of United Nations decisions; the UN could be said to be the common ancestor of both. Colonists throughout the solar system had fused their individual development plans for each planet into a system-level agenda, and were coordinating to implement it. They created BHRG as one arm of this effort, used it to engage in a wide range of research, and finally created AADD as a concrete expression of that R & D network.

  Given the nature of the project, most of AADD’s members were from Mars or the asteroid belt. Many of its members from Earth eventually migrated offworld. Terran civilization had become extremely conservative. Preservation of established norms—and protection of established interests—was equated with virtue. The result was a kind of soft fascism that combined quasi–free market economies with authoritarian political control—not exactly an ideal environment for inquisitive scientists. Anything questioning the existing constellation of powers was a threat. The scientific community was strictly hierarchical, and research was allowed only in certain fields. The important thing was not productive science, but protection of the status quo.

  For the promising young scientists and engineers who sensed the dangers of this system, the freedom offered by BHRG’s philosophy was even more attractive than the prospect of working on accretion disk technology. Those who left Earth were seen as traitors. Other young researchers were branded as undesirable elements and forcibly deported offworld.

  By the time AADD was established, plans were in place for what would become Ouroboros. From this point on, the artificial accretion disk and terraforming of the Martian surface were part of a single vision.

  The accretion disk would be completed in thirty years, with another half century to terraform Mars. The eighty-year timeline kept the project within the lifetime of the investors. Once the accretion disk was producing energy, AADD would have its own source of revenue. The question was how to finance the project until then. AADD’s solution was to entice investors with profits from rapid appreciation of real estate on Mars and the main asteroids, terraformed through energy provided by Kali. This incentive became the key to obtaining financing for the project. Chandrasekhar Station—beginning with the construction of Ouroboros—was the first step on a path that would continue for decades.

  “WE WON’T HAVE TIME to mourn Graham after today, will we, Tatsuya?”

  “That’s how it is with any project like this.”

  Catherine and Tatsuya were on the ring’s maglev, bound for South Platform. Nicknamed “the bullet” by the construction crews, the maglev provided rapid transportation between platforms. There were several other smaller vehicles, single-seaters dubbed “trucks.” Both systems moved at satellite speed, covering the three-thousand-kilometer distance between platforms in under twenty minutes.

  Viewed from the equinoctial point above Ouroboros, both bullet and ring would be revolving clockwise. Since they were traveling in the direction of rotation, Catherine and Tatsuya sat opposite each other at a table attached to the side of the train that was away from the ring. The train was pressurized and was often used as a temporary habitat as well as for transport. The door to the compartment was flanked with small lockers flush with the wall, with storage for emergency oxygen and coffee mugs labeled with the names of their owners.

  Keeping the compartment clean was the responsibility of the users. While things were reasonably tidy, the walls were marked with stains from what might have been sauce that floated, weightless, through the compartment when the bullet had stopped while someone was eating.

  “Okay, we’re under the gun. But SysCon has more to do than just make up lost time. We’ve got to turn detective and find out why Graham was killed.”

  “Like in those whodunit softs you love to read? Figure out the killer from a speck of dust or some other microscopic bit of evidence?”

  “Yes, but that’s not enough. We can’t just wait for suspects to get killed off one by one before we nail the culprit. We’ve got to work out a solution before someone else becomes a victim. Like Sherlock Holmes. Do you follow, Watson?”

  “I don’t know. Holmes was a genius who could run rings around the experts. But this is real. It’s up to the Guardians—”

  “It’s up to us too. I’ve already briefed them, but they can’t do anything about this on their own. There’s an AI in the mix here. You sense it too, don’t you? There’s something very wrong about this accident.”

  “I guess. There’s no way Graham could have fallen off the ring. It’s physically impossible.”

  Ouroboros, the first stage in the Chandrasekhar Station project, was a five-meter-wide ribbon of metal stretching almost 13,000 kilometers around Kali at a radial distance of 2,025 kilometers. Scale the ring down to a diameter of one meter, and a few dozen atoms laid end to end would be enough to span its width. This metallic thread, with Kali at its center, was rotating clockwise at 4,440 meters per second. Because of its continuous ring shape, Ouroboros had no net gravitational interaction with Kali and was vulnerable to anything that might alter its position. Without active stabilization, Ouroboros would begin to oscillate and sooner or later fall into the black hole. To prevent that, the ring could alter its shape dynamically, damping any undesirable resonant energy.

  North Platform had been constructed first. Then th
e ring was extended clockwise along the path of orbit with three more platforms built at ninety-degree intervals. Each platform incorporated nuclear fusion for power, data processing, and communications equipment, and life-support systems for the safety and comfort of the building and maintenance crews. North and South Platforms were mainly living quarters. East and West Platforms emphasized infrastructure and support equipment. AIs to control the ring stabilization system were deployed east and west, facing each other across the ring. But at the moment only AI Shiva, on East Platform, was fully functional. AI Sati, its opposite number, was still in final testing.

  “That’s right. As long as you’re on the ring, it’s impossible to fall into Kali. You’re in free fall around it. But that’s not what bothers me about this accident. Did you read SecDiv’s analysis?”

  Dr. Chapman’s fall into Kali was a conundrum. How had it happened? Tatsuya had already received the Security Division report. The time stamp showed that it had arrived just before the funeral.

  Chapman had taken a truck to East Platform, where he had apparently input some modifications to Shiva. After Chandrasekhar Station was complete, its orientation and positioning systems would be distributed to avoid reliance on a single AI. But for now it was up to Shiva to keep the ring stable. To prevent tampering with such a critical system, the AI’s programs couldn’t be modified remotely. Modifications could only be done by authorized personnel physically present on East Platform.

  Whatever his objective had been, Chapman had fulfilled it, then boarded the truck and begun retracing his route. Yet he went only partway before turning back. Judging from his actions, he must have realized that there was some flaw in the modifications he’d made. Evidently he’d been desperate to return right away, for he removed the truck’s console cover and forcibly disconnected the speed governor. The truck’s speed quickly exceeded safe limits.