Misjump Page 27

  “Hey, it is not like you didn’t get better,” said Ivo.

  “Well, kinda,” agreed Fumi. “So, what do we do about it? The controlled animals, not the whole me being dead thing.”

  “We could flood the area with extra nanites, but I don’t fancy trying to keep them all powered. There is a limit to how many microwave transmitters we can run and not cook everything,” said Lori.

  “We could charge them up and have them tap power from the parasite like we did with the initial infection,” suggested Ivo.

  “Yup, while the charge lasts,” said Lori. “Do you think that we will get them all?”

  Ivo rubbed his forehead. “Most of them but no, not all,” he admitted.

  “And there was me thinking that we had won,” said Fumi.

  Lori nodded slowly. “If we can remove the radiation, the parasites will die. It is not going to be quick or easy.”

  “What about natural radiation?” asked Ivo.

  “Probably not enough for the parasites to survive except in a few places. We can have the locals deal with those. Scorched earth approach. There are protocols for helping a planet recover from a nuclear exchange. Perhaps we can use those. Again, neither quick nor easy,” said Lori.

  “Uh, not that we are short on problems but isn’t a lot of the local wildlife going to keel over when the parasites stop controlling them?”, asked Fumi.

  Lori took a drink of her coffee and made a face. It was Klondike grown. “Yes, I think so. We could scan them and see if we can build a parasite proof version. It won’t have been done before, but it is theoretically possible. A few would be able to make more the natural way.”

  Ivo looked at Lori. “Can you build a living thing? That seems like playing God to me. Only Allah can make life or anything truly perfect.”

  Lori shook her head. “It would be more of a copy than creating it from new and it will be far from perfect. I don’t see why not though. We can make a starship that way.”

  Ivo nodded. “Could you make a human body that was immune to the parasite?” His voice balanced between awed and horrified.

  Lori shrugged. “Biologically, it wouldn’t be any different. We are just mammals.”

  He opened his mouth and shut it again, apparently searching for words. Fumi cut in. “If you are thinking what I think that you are thinking, don’t go there. I am not even sure that I want to go back to being biological. Anyway, you need me like this. We have an ecology to rebuild. Hell, if it were any more intrusive, we would be terraforming the place.”

  Ivo and Lori nodded and pulled their tablets over. They had work to plan.

  Epilogue

  Jax opened his eyes when the petal of cherry blossom fell on to his face. The sky was blue and clean above him with wisps of cloud. He saw it through the branches of a leafy tree. There was a sweet scent the air. He realised that he was laying on something harder than the couch in the medical bay and reached down to feel the roughness of the wood. He turned his head and saw Fumi standing beside him, dressed in a kimono. He blinked. She never wore traditional clothes.

  “What the… oh. Oh, crap! Am I dead? I am dead, aren’t I? Goddamn it!” he said.

  Fumi smiled at him. “Do you want to be dead?”

  “Hell no. But I guess that I have to be if I am here unless I changed my mind about another copy. Did I?” he asked.

  “No,” said Fumi, “you didn’t change your mind.”

  Jax sat up and rolled his shoulders, noticing that he was wearing a ship suit that looked badly out of place in the small park. “Well, I guess that settles it then. I don’t feel dead, just hungry.”

  Fumi called a plate of spicy bean stew out of nowhere and handed it to him as he swung his feet off what he now saw was a picnic table. “We get to make the choice. I am still me,” she said.

  He spooned up a mouthful of the stew. “It’s good! Like Lori makes. So, how long was I out?”

  “About a week, human time. We don’t have to follow the rules here though,” she replied.

  “Did the greenies attack? Is that that how I bought it?” he asked.

  “Yes, they did and kind of. You went down swinging. We won,” she said. There would be time for more explanations later.

  “Well damn! Sounds like I missed it all the fun. Is there anything left to do?” he asked.

  Fumi grinned. “Oh, yes! You have no idea.”

  Thanks and acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the people who have made this book possible.

  Annette Young of 5reasonstoread.com for her critique and encouragement.

  My patient editor at Windhaven press. Any errors that remain are despite their her best efforts. My thanks also to Neil Gaiman for recommending Windhaven.

  My Beta-readers who offered excellent feedback, none of which was to abandon all hope.

  Rebecca Bosson for additional edits and a painstaking dedication to hunting out hyphen misuse.

  ARC Media associates for help with the cover art.

  Notes for the reader

  I have tried to make this book as realistic as possible, considering that there are spaceships and future technology throughout the book. There are a few bits that are perhaps something of a stretch.

  Faster than light travel present presents a problem for physics, specifically that it breaks causality. We talk of objects having a light cone, a track in space-time where they can interact with other things. Interacting with other things is pretty much what causality is. It is limited by time and the speed of light, both invariants (for some values of invariant). If we can disappear from one place and arrive at another, are we the same object? Well, in the case of the Sarafina’s misjump, the answer is probably a no. The ship entered space-time effectively from outside it. Would the same apply to a successful jump? Maybe. We are yet to do one. Is there some wiggle room here? There might be. While we tend to think of time as linear and happening at the same pace everywhere, that is an approximation. Time proceeds at differently based on the curvature of the local space-time. Big masses distort space-time and an object travelling close to the speed of light is massive indeed. This would probably shorten the light cone, but experimental data is lacking and probably will be for quite a while.

  Artificial gravity is quite the trick. There are problems with this as well. Does it imply that we can alter mass or are we just providing an attractive force of some kind? If we can change mass then we can mess with good old e = mc2. That would imply that we could exceed the speed of light because our mass would be non-infinite and that is causality broken again.

  Cold sleep is probably more difficult and dangerous than depicted here but there may be a way.

  As for nanites (or parasites) powered by short wavelength radiation, that has a sounder basis. The smaller a receiver is, the worse it is at picking up longwave radiation. Small things would need short wavelengths, which are higher energy in any case. Some have suggested attaching a nanite to a bacteria to act as a power source which is not so different from the solution that Lori comes up with.

  Could a model of a human (or a greenie) be self-aware? We don’t really understand consciousness other than to say that it is an emergent behaviour. Neural networks (organic or otherwise) act in certain ways. It wouldn’t make a difference if they were real or simulated as long as the simulation were accurate.

  You may have noticed patterns in the names. Neuholme has a lot of German influences. The mining colony has a lot of names that are specific to Friesland, a northern district of the Netherlands. Ivo Kevic’s ancestors doubtless came from Croatia while Lori’s ancestors were Portuguese. Most people that interact with offworlders can speak Anglic, but other languages are spoken. I have assumed that people have kept some of their ancestral cultures and stuck with people from the same background.

  Finally, can you jumpstart a fusion reactor with a bunch of batteries and a degree of determination? The manual probably wouldn’t recommend it but Gregor really didn’t have time to follow the rules.
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