Dialogue – Page 3 – Nanofic~Sci~Fi

Indian Food

Grousers will be spaced.

“So I hear you like curries.”

“That’s not funny. You know I hate how space erodes your sensitivity to taste.”

“Fair enough. The rations, which are, by the way, spicy precisely to counter that effect, hit the spot for me, at least. It’s too bad there isn’t more to go around.”

“It’s a long flight and every gram counts. Cut it with water.”

“Ugh. I hate drinking our own rad shielding.”

“The rubbery taste is a bit off-putting, I’ll grant. But the ammonic tang of lightly reprocessed piss isn’t any better.”

“True enough. Pass the water. And also the aloo matar.”

Ed note: c.f. spacecoach concept IRL.

Gray Goo

“This is thermodynamically impossible.”

“No one was particularly scared of these things, since they’re so small.”

“And no one particularly should be, since they cannot dissipate Brownian energy, nor can they reproduce on such limited raw materials.”

“All true,” remarked the speaker, somewhat disgruntled. “But that doesn’t change the fact that one of our orbital research facilities has—and quite otherwise inexplicably, I might add—dissolved into a perfect sphere of uniform color.”

The slide changed. A red ball stood superimposed against the stars, a sinister crescent moon.

“Why!” Someone gasped. “That was the I.S.S Clarke!”

The speaker nodded. “Indeed, Clarke was painted red, for better visibility to near-IR scanners.”

“My condolences, Charlie.”

“So they don’t operate on individual atoms,” someone muttered.

“Speak up.”

“They operate and exist on the molecular—not atomic—level. Or else they’d have simply decomposed the pigments, and it would take some unpredictable appearance. It’d form a nanoscale metastructure, so I guess it’d be some kind of an iridescent panoply.”

“Correct. Notice that operating at a higher spatial level obviates the major energy constraints. The material-limitations ones did not apply, as Clarke is—was—made primary of steel nanofoam and composite volatiles.”

“So,” the speaker continued, “we have a real gray goo situation on our hands. So far, it shows no signs of stripping the extremely tenuous atmosphere in LEO, but eventually it will fall to Earth, and this crisis will become, quite possibly, an apocalypse. Any suggestions?”

Subspace

I.T. isn’t better in the future.

“Apparently, they use some kind of subspace.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Ugh. No. Wrong word. More like, spacetime is some . . . thing, kindof? Since it has all these associated properties. Think of it like a ribbon. The thing they use is sortof like the ‘hangers’ that the ribbon is hanging on. See?”

“Vaguely. What’s the effect, anyway?”

“The effect is they can project radio-band white noise, from any point, to any point, using a ‘sublight’ wave traveling about one light-year per second.”

“‘Point!’—Ha!—Try: ‘a planet!‘ . . . Why white noise, though?”

“Yeah. Apparently that’s about the only thing. Anything structured gets scrambled immediately. Not especially useful, although you could probably rig some kind of ansible.”

“Doesn’t that violate something?”

“Sortof, but nothing is going faster than light; it’s just there’s less distance it has to cover in ‘subspace’.”

“Regardless, this interstellar denial-of-service attack is pretty awful, I’ll say. Can’t we send some spaceship back the other way? Make them stop?”

“It’s hard because subspace is seething with activity. That’s what corrupts any heterodyned signal. However, we tried sending a one kilogram test mass through.”

“. . . and?”

“Sir, I know you have family in Pittsburgh . . .”

Niven Ring

“You got a problem with relativity, son?”

“Report!”

“Sir! The ring has become destabilized! She’s dipped 50 km down!”

“Already? Get me Morgenstross!”

“Right away!”

The functionary fiddles clumsily with his communicator, then slams it onto the desk, where it squawks, as if in protest. Over the radio, Morgenstross is shouting something. Slowly. Very slowly.

“I couldn’t pick it up directly, sir. I had to go through four relays around the ring. Four!”

“From a certain perspective, we’re racing into the future.”

“Quiet! I can’t hear!”

“. . .”

“Morgenstross! Enable emergency RCS in your segments! I can’t do it from here. Everything’s shot!”

Morgenstross continues shouting, his voice audibly lower and slower.

“Morgenstross, listen to me!”

“. . . I don’t think he can hear you, commander.”

“Then patch me through!”

“No; I mean, I think he cannot, because the time slip between here and lower is so high. Relative to us, he’s so far down the gravity well by now that our sectors are, from his perspective, racing into the future.”

“Speak English, cadet.”

“Time slows down for objects falling into black holes. The Niven ring is lost. We must get to the pods. We must also warn the people behind us in the ring before it’s too late.”

“. . .”

“And sir, we should hurry. Morgenstross was probably trying to do just that.”

Angular Momentum

Advantages of tumbling pigeons.

“Tell me straight, skipper. What’s wrong?”

“We’re dead. That’s what’s wrong.”

“!!!”

“Even as we stand here, we’re dead men. That last bomb pumped us full of a whole soup of radiation. I’m surprised the hull hasn’t shattered from neutron embrittlement. But the gamma rays are what did us in.”

In the background, someone clutches his abdomen in sudden pain.

“Well, do something!”

“Detonate this warhead in the null-G section amidships.”

“You’re mad!”

“I will be, unless you get on it. I’ve already notified engineering.”

The young lieutenant stands for a moment, petrified.

“Oh fine. Since understanding might make you more obedient. We spin end-over-end for gravity, and right now our plane of rotation is lined up with their vessel. They’re about 15 klicks away, so if we break in half at the right moment, we might get the tail end flung close enough to detonate our atomic drive right next to them before they notice.”

“But! We’ll all die!”

“We’re already dead. Now move it.”

Defenses

Not exactly diplomacy.

“Lemme get this straight—at the bottom of that mineshaft is a thermonuclear warhead. And at the top of that mineshaft is a steel plate. In 41 seconds, their warship is going to pass by in orbit overhead and we light it off?”

“That’s about the size of it. Any questions?”

“. . .”

“Well, I mean, isn’t the plate kindof . . . you know . . . not aerodynamic?”

“That turns out not to matter. At the speed it will be going, it will be in the atmosphere, oh, only about 130 milliseconds.”

Peter’s mind boggled.

“That’s like a hundred kilometers per second!”

“Yeah. Through their hull. Neat, huh?”

Somewhere in the distance . . .

**BANG**

A Monte-Carlo Simulation

Because really, how long is “short” for a galaxy?

“We’re alone.”

“Hmm?”

“Ran a sim. It’s really obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. See these green dots?”

The visualization in front of her swam with millions—probably billions—of green fireflies.

“Yeah hmm?”

“Each is a planet in the sim. 10¹¹-ish. Let’s say there are 10³ civilizations, starting within 10⁸ years of each other, technologically. Once a civilization attains spaceflight, each of their planets colonizes a vacant one every 500 years.”

“So how long does it take?”

“12 500 years for half the galaxy, and no one else has even started. See where I’m going?”

“Exponential growth is a bitch?”

“Ha. Try again.”

“It seems to me that if you pick a random point in time, chances are, either the galaxy will be empty, or else full. 20 000 years should be enough to colonize the whole thing, and that’s a very short time in galactic terms.”

“Exactly. So the fact we still haven’t heard from anyone?”

“It means either we’re alone, or we’re the first.”