14 Andromedae — Chapter 2

A sci-fi web novel

A spec of dust a micron across floated lazily by another spec of dust, a micron across. As they came into closer proximity, a few electrons decided they would tunnel from the first to the second, creating a shared orbital between the two for a fraction of a second. In that moment, they rotated closer to one another before finally the repulsive forces of their nuclei pushed them apart, forever.

High up in the atmosphere, streaks of smoke were visible. At their ends burned the brightest points in the sky. Reverse thrusters — four of them — each created a bright raindrop shaped flame against the deep violet sky.

Eventually, the spec of dust would be impacted by the wave of dirt kicked up by the spacecraft. It would take a while for it to reach the spot, but in this atmosphere it wouldn’t dissipate before then.

The sound waves hit first, vibrating everything native to the planet in an alien rhythm. Nothing was safe. Insects began bouncing off of the ground where they had been indistinguishable from the dusty terrain, in response to the new noise.

There was a second reason the insects scattered. Our spec of dust swooped downward as a circular section of the ground began to open and atmosphere rushed into the space below. The ground gave way and revealed mechanical doors that had concealed a subterranean compartment.

On the approaching shuttle, Zed plunged an electron beam wrench deeper into the machinery that was malfunctioning in real time before his eyes.

Zed had followed the clues for 9 rotations. First a blown molecular electromigration fuse. Next, a quantum dot that glowed purple when it shouldn’t have been fluorescent at all. Something was very wrong with this flight computer.

That’s probably because it was one of a kind. Not your average terminal, it had its own edge processor to supplement its connection to the colony’s central mainframe. You were often queued behind other people when you tried to run anything on the mainframe. No one really minded, except Zed.

No one else could really do anything about it. Zed’s had been the responsibility of maintaining the mainframe itself. Only that didn’t keep him busy enough, apparently. How could he leave all these extra components in storage when they could easily be put to use until they were needed? “Easily”.

The most finicky were supposed to be the micromechanical components, not the quantum dots. 50 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous.

Today it might kill him.

Tau Ceti F would suffer from a continuous bombardment of asteroids but for the super-Jovian planet shepherding the planet’s debris disk. That didn’t mean the colony was continuously safe, only that it wasn’t continuously in danger. This asteroid, planetoid or whatever it was screamed danger.

Zed screamed toward the planet in his one-man lander.

Nanofabrication wasn’t an issue back at the colony. In the lander, though, Zed had to fix any broken part. He couldn’t fabricate any replacements. So, he hunched over his computer. The screen was not blank, but displayed a trajectory that was off by 7 degrees from the one he’d extrapolated from the continuous accelerometer and gyroscopic readouts on the opposite side of the lander. Pages filled with trigonometry floated around the compartment. There was a rounding error that had accumulated to a dangerous degree.

That erroneous accumulator was based on a quantum dot array, the electromigration fuse to which had blown. Zed had to reconstruct it and that would require etching a new trace with electron beam lithography. It had been made a handheld technology in the Earth year 2091.

The purple light disappeared. Zed reached over to his holographic keyboard and punched the restart key. The accumulator’s quantum dots began flashing one at a time. The startup diagnostic passed. Zed almost thanked God, but no one did that anymore. Nevertheless, the ground accelerating towards the lander put the fear of God into him. People don’t really make sense that way, he thought.

The reverse thrusters began spitting out flame at intervals, instead of their constant burn. Soon enough, Zed would land. In meantime he went back to his readouts and started his trigonometry over again. If he didn’t land perfectly, the lander was reinforced with a roll cage. He might survive that, but he wasn’t about to bet the farm on it.

As he did the manual calculations by hand he thought about what a silly invention graphite pencils were. Why hadn’t they ever been replaced by something replenishable? Surely a nanoassembler could replace graphite layers as quickly as they were worn off. Only where to get the constituent particles?

That’s the kind of idea Zed was constantly brooding over. The kind of idea that most of his peers ignored. The kind of thing that had brought him out so far from the colony a few rotations ago. He had been working on a simulation of the debris cloud that followed Tau Ceti F but rarely collided with it, an n-body problem that could only be extrapolated into the future a short time before it had to be synced up with observation again.

This simulation seemed accurate about 10 rotations (Earth days) into the future. Zed believed it was important, and he had gained the support of the Safety specialists in his colony. 2nd gen’ers like Zed didn’t hold strictly to the disciplines (there had been enough reassignments) and Zed didn’t care who approved of his hobbies — unless it meant he could use more compute time.

Imagine Zed’s surprise when his simulation showed a large asteroid breaking free of the super-Jovian planet’s influence and heading towards Tau! His “friends” treated it like his problem. His program, his wheelhouse.

So, here he was. Proving that he could handle the whole damn asteroid field on his own since he had the audacity to monitor it. He checked on the explosives floating around amongst the trigonometry covered pages and found to his satisfaction that they remained disarmed.

He’d need to arm them and distribute them around the asteroid as soon as he landed.

Aleph checked his systems. He felt one part checking him back, like the football players did to each other on Earth, long before humanity had adapted to Teegarden’s Star C.

Aleph knew that his parts, or alters as some called them, were fractal in their nature. They each spoke an emotional language that reflected some part of his past. Their languages encoded the wisdom of experience into an unspoken language local to these subsystems of his mind. Each subsystem was composed of multiple personalities. They interacted with each other like the members of a mathematical group and they decomposed into subgroups just the same.

Aleph was a bodhisattva to his psyche. He suffered with himself. It was the only way to survive on Teegarden’s Star with its -47 degree celcius temperature and 11.4 day orbit. You learned meditation in order to maintain your sanity, but there was more to it than that. Not everyone could hold two ideas together in their mind at once or mediate between them. Yes, meditation was becoming more than self-help on Teegarden’s Star. It was becoming a part of who the colonists were.

What’s more, the wildlife on Teegarden’s Star was frozen in ice. What it lacked in mobility it made up for with psychic capabilities. Or, so the colonists had come to believe.

The football player asserting himself again. A prompting to get up and be with another, to focus outward instead of inward. This would take work and patience. Aleph did not intend to “stay out”.

A knock on the door was urgent. The woman on the other side did not wait to be granted entry. She tossed a radio to Aleph. Aleph caught it, shaken out of his meditative state.

… in 3 Earth days, Tau Ceti f will re-enter the habitable zone once again, beginning the next 1/2 year of habitable zone conditions for the Tau colony. Greenhouse parameters have been adjusted on schedule, and additional measures are being taken to observe nearby asteroids…

Aleph rubbed his eyes.

… one of which is projected to break away from the disk… tomorrow.

What?

Aleph switched off the receiver. Sheiv cursed him.

“I have a theory,” she began, “ and it goes like this: listen to the radio if you want to stay in-touch with reality.”

“Later,” Aleph was brief with his friend, “I’m working on something.”

“You’re always working on something! What if you worked on this for once?” She motioned with her hands between the two of them. “We haven’t hung out in ages! Let’s go to the mess hall.”

Aleph nodded in agreement. One had to eat. He got up off of the icy floor and headed towards the door. Sheiv grinned with satisfaction.

As they walked through the halls, they passed multiple colonists studying particular oddities in the transparent ice walls that surrounded them — above, below and beside. The ocean was frozen, true, but not entirely uniform. Sometimes Aleph could swear that he saw a light or a shape moving just beyond the wall. They all swore it.

The mess hall was the largest gathering space in the colony. In it the two found multiple groups of colonists. They were organized into their respective disciplines: Engineering, Health, Agriculture, Information, Construction, Chemistry / Materials, History / Records, Safety. The far wall of the mess hall was covered in plants. They were planted directly into the transparent ice. Some had roots that grew 5 times their size above surface. They invaded the cold ocean at all angles.

Agricultural experts walked around beneath the canopy of plants, checking a graft here, pruning a plant there. Some picked fruits and vegetables from the tangle of foliage. A few served the food on trays, along with supplements that came in tubes.

Once they’d crossed the distance to the serving counter, Aleph grabbed his helping gratefully.

Aleph’s discipline was Health. He didn’t need Sheiv’s reminders, though he was grateful for fer companionship. They sat together and began eating.

Aleph turned the radio back on so they could listen together.

… food production on Teegarden’s Star is down 30%. This trend must be reversed if the colony is going to survive, without becoming dependent on outside help, as some have pointed out, which is of course an unprecedented idea.

“That’s baloney. These idiots have no idea what we’ve done here.” Sheiv spoke with her usual confidence. Not without reason, she was a motivated individual. Hers was the 9th discipline. Aleph didn’t know anything about it and most didn’t.

“So what do you do all day if it isn’t too pointed a question?” Aleph asked. He didn’t know if he was referring to her objection to his meditating or her secretive profession.

“I’ll show you before long.” She rearranged the food on her tray.

There was a rumor that the 9th profession spent time on the surface. Doing what, only administrators and the 9'ers themselves knew. It was just a rumor.

“So… what do you wear when you go out?” He asked, then realized how it sounded. “Out on the surface, I mean.” He corrected himself even though it was obvious.

Old Earth manners of speaking still persisted, despite the colonists’ updated intuitions. Something Aleph intended to explore sooner than later from a psychological perspective.

“This.” She gestured to her clothing. A uniform like they all wore. It worked if you had a heat reservoir generator nearby, like the one that melted a thin layer of the ice around them in the mess hall, turning it into water for the plants.

The uniform fit her well enough. It was the teal colour that all second generation colonists wore and had nine white threads on the left shoulder — to show her unusual profession. The same white threads outlined her contours, on the sides and front of the shirt. Simple but nice.

It would not do outside.

Aleph would say she was pulling his leg, except for the look on her face. He looked inside and found that he was quiet. No accusations rang from anywhere inside him. She meant what she had said.

Or, so he thought.