World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  “He’s paralyzed,” said Seb2. “And he’s lapsing into a coma. If the tumor isn’t removed, he might last a week with immediate medical attention.”

  “And without medical attention?”

  “A day or two. He won’t regain consciousness fully, he’s too weak.”

  “Will he suffer?” thought Seb.

  “Probably,” said Seb2.

  “Good,” said Seb, and Walked.

  Chapter 40

  International Space Station

  Massimo Paolini looked back at the International Space Station from his precarious viewpoint, tethered to the far edge of one of the solar arrays. He couldn’t see Columbus laboratory from his vantage point, which cheered him up considerably. He’d been sharing the tiny lab on the ISS with Petr, a humorless Czech engineer. Five long weeks had passed without the man even smiling. And Massimo liked a good joke. He could be the life and soul of the party. He had dedicated a great deal of time to trying to break through to his grim-featured colleague. Every kind of joke had been used in the attempt. Even physics jokes, which were universally acknowledged as poor, but often made physicists laugh in an attempt to appear normal. Nothing had worked. The gregarious Italian had finally given up, and consequently, was delighted to take his turn on a little light maintenance outside of the station.

  Naturally, Massimo wasn’t alone out there, but Vlad, his space-walk buddy, was currently out of sight on the opposite array. Protocol demanded they stick together, but Massimo had found in Vlad a kindred spirit, in his flexible and pragmatic approach to rules.

  “I have to smell everybody’s balls for half a year in this floating toilet,” the Russian had commented drily. “The least we can do is have a little private time while we look at our planet, da?”

  Massimo had agreed wholeheartedly. He turned and looked at the planet now. Earth. Beneath him, well, not beneath him, there being no up or down in space, but he had to think in words that made some kind of sense, so beneath would just have to do, the planet rolled. A gigantic blue ball. Massimo was no poet, but his soul leaped within him every time he got outside the ISS and saw the vast blueness of his home unfolding in front of him. It was so blue. Nothing could prepare you for that. Clouds danced across the scene, their shadows trailing across oceans and land masses.

  “Big blue ball of hugeness,” thought Massimo. “No. Enormous slow-mo football made of blue stuff. No. Spinny big thing. Shit.”

  Kramer—the American—had told him the English language was best for true poetry, but Massimo was starting to wonder if Kramer had only said that because she couldn’t speak any other languages herself. If Kramer hadn’t been female, blonde and kind of cute, he might have argued in favor of the beauty of the Italian language, but since he was hoping for a celebratory dinner with Kramer once they were home, he’d conceded the point. A celebratory dinner followed by some traditional Italian disrobing ceremonies, he hoped. So, English it was.

  Azure was another word for blue, right?

  “Azure, as you’re turning beneath me—”. Now, that was clever. A play on words. In a second language. Massimo felt a flush of pride. He might try that one on Kramer later. He knew there was no chance of serious flirting while they were onboard, but he could do some preliminary work and—

  “Che cazzo?!” he said, crossing himself involuntarily. Which wasn’t an easy thing to do in a spacesuit.

  The area of space alongside the ISS was no longer unoccupied. It was filled by a massive object which Massimo, under less stressful conditions, would undoubtedly have described as “a bloody massive spaceship”. Considering he was currently at the end of a solar array, tethered by a single strap, floating far above anywhere that might remotely be considered ‘safe ground’, he actually described it in a far more colorful way. He did this in Italian. It was an unbroken string of swearing that only dried up when he finally drew breath. Under other circumstances, it might have qualified him for some sort of award. As it was, no one heard it, and he had time to take a good look at the spaceship and consider his next actions carefully, before he opened a channel to Kramer in the control room. He wondered for a second what her first name was, and why she had never revealed it to anyone. Then he marveled at the human brain’s ability to think such a useless thought on an occasion such as humankind’s first contact with aliens.

  “Massimo to Kramer.”

  “This is Kramer. How’s it looking out there this afternoon, Massi?”

  Only Kramer and Massimo’s mother were permitted to call him Massi.

  He looked at the sleek gray surface which partly blocked his view of Earth. It was cigar shaped, but as Massimo watched, it transformed itself, both ends moving inward as the middle expanded, ending up looking like a miniature moon.

  He opened his mouth to report, then closed it again. Why had no alarms gone off? Why hadn’t Houston alerted them? He thought hard for a few seconds. The spaceship hadn’t been there before. Now it was. It had appeared—some might say—magically. Magical appearances were frowned upon by those with a scientific mindset. He thought back to the rehydrated macaroni and cheese he had eaten about an hour ago. As well as being an insult to Italian cooking, the cheese had tasted particularly strange. He stared hard at the spaceship, blinked and looked again. It was still there.

  “Um. All looks, er, very nice here,” he said. “Big planet, stars and whatnot. How are things with you?”

  “Everything’s fine. Massi, did you just say, ‘whatnot’?”

  “So, er, nothing to report on the proximity detectors? The cameras? Radar?”

  “No, all normal. You seeing something out there?”

  Massimo took another very long look at the spaceship. He thought about the cheese.

  “No, nothing. I’m feeling a little unwell. I think I’ll come back in early if that’s ok.”

  “Can you stay another thirty minutes? Just to make sure that panel will stay in place?”

  “Well, I think it might be better if I—”

  “For me, Massi?” Kramer was doing that husky voice thing. It was very unfair.

  “Thirty minutes more,” he said, looking at the spaceship, which now seemed to have thousands of tiny lights racing across its surface in every direction. He knew that American cheese was poorer than the glory that was Italian cheese, but he was shocked at the powerful side-effects. He only hoped his stomach would hold up for another half hour. Toilet accidents in the sealed environment of a space suit were no fun at all.

  Chapter 41

  The 747-400 nosed its way through the clouds above Heathrow, bumping slightly as it banked slowly through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, ending up facing almost due west. The flight to JFK was close to reaching its cruising altitude of 35,000ft, about twenty-seven minutes after takeoff, when a tall man appeared in First Class.

  Chief Steward David Burn saw it happen. He was mixing a vodka martini for a guy in 1A (extremely dry, chilled glass, with a twist, and could he make sure the accompanying nuts were heated) when the man materialized, standing by the empty 4B. Onboard manifests were correct, every passenger was accounted for. David’s first reaction at a passenger appearing in mid-flight wasn’t one of bewilderment or shock, but a mild annoyance at the administrative headache it would cause when they reached JFK. He had seen an awful lot of bad behavior in First Class over the fourteen years he’d been working for the airline. Tantrums, fights, projectile vomiting, thefts, every kind of sexual misdemeanor and once—memorably—an impromptu game of rugby. He wondered which section of the flight report covered magical materializations. He shuddered at the prospect of explaining it to his supervisor.

  He pulled the corners of his vest down and smoothed his hair before walking toward the stranger.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Can I offer you a drink?”

  The man smiled at him. David flushed slightly. He supposed unauthorized magical appearances on his flights wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if they were all this cute.

  “No, thanks, I�
�m good,” the man said. He winked. “Just passing through.”

  With that, he stepped sideways and vanished.

  No paperwork after all, then.

  ***

  NASA’s high-altitude prototype drone was named the LEO-447/33, but everyone from the Director down called it the Kármán Tickler. In polite company, the nickname was attributed to the fact that the drone cruised at an altitude of about sixty miles, just a couple miles short of the Kármán Line—the nominal border between Earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space. But the reason the nickname stuck was the uncanny resemblance the LEO-447/33 bore to a popular sex toy.

  The Kármán Tickler’s shaft was hollow, designed to carry up to eight trainee astronauts. Weightlessness training was a necessary—but highly expensive—part of NASA’s program. If the Kármán Tickler, a lightweight and comparatively energy-efficient drone could do the job without even the need for a pilot, NASA hoped to partly fund other projects by offering highly-priced weightless trips to members of the public. If, that is, members of the public wouldn’t be reluctant to climb inside a giant penis.

  “I hope this works,” thought Seb, as they arrived in the Tickler. “It seems a hell of a risk not to Walk to the ship directly.” He realized he was still expecting a response from Seb2. He experienced the mental experience of a stumble, before righting himself and taking a breath.

  If he’d risked a direct Walk, H’wan may have turned on him. The ship might have said he wouldn’t intervene with the Rozzers’ mission, but H’wan had said nothing about not trying to kill Seb if he got involved. This way, he stood a chance of getting to the Engine unnoticed.

  Seb’s arrival and departure on the Tickler were separated by 16.58 seconds. He had intended moving on immediately, but when he’d emerged inside the Tickler, he’d found all seven trainees, plus their instructor, unconscious. Rather than expecting everyone to wear breathing apparatus, the Tickler’s designers—with one eye on the marketability of their weightless fun flights—were trying out a pressurized cabin for the first time. The air supply had experienced a catastrophic failure, and the occupants of the craft had less than a minute left before their bodies shut down, followed by brain damage, then death.

  Seb found the fault and replaced the ruptured hoses that had not been tested comprehensively at this speed or altitude. The air supply resumed. The trainees would wake up in a few minutes. He knew his Manna-produced replacement hoses would not go unnoticed once the Tickler was back on the ground, so he left a note on the onboard e-log saying, Test your life-support systems more rigorously next time. He wondered what NASA would make of it. He shrugged and Walked.

  ***

  Massimo was only a few minutes away from the end of his shift fixing the solar array. He’d always tried to stay as long as possible on previous trips outside, but this time, all he wanted to do was crawl back through the airlock. Back into the beautiful, smelly, claustrophobic ISS where he could see some familiar objects. Rather than huge alien spaceships.

  The spaceship was still there, he knew that. He’d last checked about two minutes ago, by glancing over his shoulder while humming the Duke of Mantua’s aria from Rigoletto and pretending nothing was amiss.

  “Tum tum, tum, tumtitum, qual piuma al vento, there are the solar panels, tightening this one now. Mm, mm, mm mm-mm-mmm, mm, mm, di pensier, there is the su-n, there is the spaceship. Sempre un amibile, tum tum tum tumtitum.”

  Finally turning his back on the cheese-produced hallucination, he started making his way back along the length of the array, his mood improving as he got closer to the hub of the ISS. He’d even be glad to see that grump, Petr.

  “Muta d’acce—nto, oh, what the crap is that?!”

  He was halfway along the array. His path was blocked by a pair of sneakers. The sneakers contained a pair of feet and—as he slowly raised his eyes—he confirmed the usual complement of legs, torso, arms and head were also present. No spacesuit, though. Just a guy. Standing on the solar array of the International Space Station in the deadly cold vacuum of space. Surely, even American cheese wasn’t capable of producing such a hallucination as this. Massimo began to suspect poisoning. It had to be Chuck. Anyone who listened to that much country music couldn’t be trusted.

  The man squatted down in front of him. He had an intelligent, friendly face. He raised a finger to his lips. Massimo shrugged. Who was he gonna tell? It would be the last communication he ever made as a professional astronaut. Robust mental health was pretty high up the list of job requirements when you worked in space. The stranger then shuffled to one side, making enough room for Massimo to get past. He waved him through.

  Massimo looked back twice on the way to the airlock. The first time, the man was still there, crouched, staring at the alien craft. Massimo noticed that the space immediately around the figure looked slightly distorted. Almost as if he was wearing some kind of invisible suit. Massimo then realized such speculation meant he was beginning to accept the evidence of his eyes. He shook his head.

  The second time Massimo looked back, the figure had gone. Massimo wondered if his digestive system had finally done its job. He looked to see if the spaceship had also evaporated, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Halfway between the ISS and the spaceship, the sneakers guy was crossing empty space. From Massimo’s angle, it looked like he was going to miss the target—he was heading too far toward the planet below.

  Then Massimo noticed a change in the spaceship. A hole had appeared in one side, an object had emerged and it was heading toward Earth. The object was dark. No light reflected from its surface. It was shaped like an inverted teardrop, the point facing the ship. The inappropriately-dressed man was on course to intercept it.

  The rounded edge of the object started to glow as it penetrated Earth’s atmosphere. The man landed on its side, sticking to it like a fly on candy. Massimo watched in horror and disbelief as the entire teardrop glowed red—then white—hot, the figure clinging to it enduring the same extreme temperatures, his body changing color. Then, just as he thought the man’s body would burst into flame and be reduced to ash, the figure seemed to sink into the teardrop, vanishing inside as the whole object made its way through atmospheric layers containing more and more air particles. As its descent was slowed, the heat grew greater and greater. Massimo offered up a silent prayer for the man he’d seen, then reminded himself it was a hallucination.

  His comms crackled into life. Kramer wasn’t using the husky voice this time. “Massimo! We’re reading a meteor at least three meters in diameter entering the atmosphere. Do you have a visual out there?”

  Massimo thought for a few moments before replying. He really, really liked his job.

  “I see it. It’s big! Why didn’t we pick it up earlier?”

  “Can’t answer that,” said Kramer. “Houston only detected it seconds ago. Like it appeared from nowhere. Must be some sort of instrument malfunction.”

  “Where’s it going to hit?”

  “That’s the good news,” said Kramer. “It’s heading for smack down in the middle of the Atlantic. Should have broken up enough not to cause any problems, luckily. Can’t understand why we didn’t detect it earlier, though. Weird.”

  “Si,” said Massimo, looking at the huge spacecraft dwarfing their own. “Weird.”

  Chapter 42

  The teardrop shape of the Unmaking Engine’s housing was designed to slow its fall by creating a shockwave in front of the blunt end. Unlike humanity’s earliest manned spacecraft, it didn’t need to sacrifice any of its mass to the intense heat, or use thick, heavy, heat resistant material as an outer coating. Instead, the first few hundred layers of particles at the fat end of the teardrop—to a depth just greater than the width of an average human hair—had one simple job: to dissipate heat. As each particle on the outermost layer reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it flew outward and inward. The layers below slowed and cooled the superheated particles. Then, the new outermost layer took the brunt of the acceleration, heat
ing up, dissipating, being slowed and cooled. And so the process continued, repeating itself until the initial fall had been slowed sufficiently.

  As it fell further through the atmosphere, the blunt end of the teardrop then increased in diameter, stretching outward, becoming, once there was enough air to make it viable, a dome, or bowl, acting like a parachute, every square inch of it instantly reacting to each change in pressure or gust of wind, stabilizing it and slowing its descent dramatically. By the time it was 40,000 feet over the ocean, it had braked to less than two-hundred-and-fifty miles per hour. If it maintained its rate of deceleration, it would be traveling at under seventy mph by the time it reached 7,000 feet, at which point it would deliver its payload—the nine-foot-long cylinder cradled in the center of the bowl. NASA lost contact as the parachute shape was deployed - the material was too thin to register on their instruments. The assumption was that the meteorite had broken up into pieces too small to be detected.

  The cylinder contained genetic material ready to rise to the surface of the ocean, once freed from its container. On the surface, it would mimic the qualities of sea water molecules, enabling it to evaporate along with the water, rising up through the atmosphere, condensing into clouds, and finally, raining its deadly contents oval onto the land below. The Unmaking Engine molecules were designed to replicate themselves as they joined the water cycle, so that every drop of rain that fell would eventually be contaminated. All human beings would die, but every other species would survive.

  Seb understood the mechanics of the Engine, its capabilities, its destructive power. He didn’t understand it intellectually, he felt it in his body. It was a very similar feeling to that which he experienced when listening to a complex piece of music. If he had tried to transcribe the music, force the notes he was hearing onto paper in a form that would make sense, he might have failed. But when he bypassed the part of his brain that wanted to categorize the music and sort it into its component parts: melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture, themes, counterpoints—when that part of his brain was disengaged—he could listen in a radically different way. It was as if he—in his entirety—experienced the music moment by moment in its entirety. Whatever the composer was trying to say was often, somehow, greater than the combination of the twelve notes he or she had chosen to arrange in various patterns in order to communicate with the listener. The music was experienced in time, linearly, the only way humans can experience anything. And yet, it was only as a whole that it made sense. Seb felt the same sensation now as he occupied the interior of the cylinder that housed the heart of the Unmaking Engine. His body knew the Engine, knew what it was dealing with. Instantly.