Maxwell's Demon Ch. 09-11

EmDee's navigation kernel was simple. It watched for gyroscopic motion, kept the ship true to its orientation, monitored the electric field generated by the drive plates, and corrected irregularities in it by dynamically bending the surfaces of the drive plates. This control loop was not infinitely fast, there were minor variations in each of the parameters.

Changes in the rate at which the void drive folded space manifested as detectable gravity waves within the bubble. When the control loop was functioning correctly, these tiny waves never exceeded a fixed ceiling value. There were no stars or black holes inside the bubble with EmDee; the ship was the sole initiator of any events in its tiny bubble universe. The following assertion was EmDee's navigation kernel invariant: No gravity wave will exceed a preconceived constant within the bubble.

EmDee's navigation loop encountered a problem it couldn't solve, a gravity wave of incredible magnitude. It was larger than the ceiling constant, and even larger than the wave generated when the void particle drive was initialized. It ran a diagnostic on its control input sensors: There was no fault. It rebooted itself once, twice, then three times.

It cried for help. It poured its log out to her and then gave up.

"Kassy, help me!" it would have said, were it anything other than a set of imperative programming instructions.

No! This isn't possible, Kassy thought. We could be anywhere, our distance calculations are no longer true. No, not on this leg! This is the most important navigation leg. This can't be happening, she screamed at the mindless machine while reading its logs.

"John!" she yelled through the quiet pilot neural link.

Kassy pressed the panic button. "Master alarm. All systems. Disengage drive! Wake up! Everyone, please, oh please, wake up!"

Inside an empty command module, red lights flashed. Monitors switched displays. Relays, hoped never to be used, altered their positions across electric busbars.

Stasis chambers aborted. Their occupants were rudely awakened, freezing, with no time to acclimate. Cryogenic fluid leaked and instantly evaporated from seals abruptly broken. Biometric alarms went off as the nearly dead were monitored by systems expecting them to be alive and awake -- they weren't.

Sarah and William let loose an agonizing wail, vomiting over the sides of their chambers though nothing came out but putrid yellow bile from three months of an empty stomach. Convulsions followed. William wasn't breathing, and the medical system's only recourse was to repeatedly dump gruesome amounts of electric current into his body. Kassy watched as he was repeatedly wrenched in hideous contortions until his lungs started working.

Jennifer sat up holding her head with fingernails digging into her scalp. She screamed ear-piercing cries of nonsense as her chest heaved from rib-crushing abdominal contractions delivering nothing but foam at the edges of her mouth.

Greg fell shivering to the floor after a failed attempt to sit up. His body was as white as the artificial lighting, with blood pressure that barely registered, and eyes rolled back into his head. He bellowed in agony as a stray jet of cryo fluid stripped the skin and flesh from his palm, straight to the bone before evaporating into nothingness. He tried to speak, emitting only a pathetic sound as his wheezing body rolled to the side of the stasis chamber.

John did not move. He didn't need to. He was the failsafe, already engaged with the piloting systems via the embedded neural link in his stasis chamber.

"Kassy! What's going on?" he said in the VR matrix.

"There was a navigation failure. I woke everyone up and disengaged the drive. I'm trying to acclimate the sensors to local space. I don't know where we are."

EmDee gracelessly rolled face-first out of void-space like a drunk party guest tripping over a chair. Its Hab-Ring dynamic balance systems, unable to adjust quickly enough, left the ship tumbling over its non-primary axis.

"Kassy! The abortive void drive shutdown left an uneven bubble as it collapsed, we're nutating, and I can't stabilize us. The Hab-Ring hub bearings are overloading, they won't handle the spin forces. We're in trouble."

There were multiple ups and downs now. The first oscillation peaked and reversed, catching the dazed crew off guard. Jennifer, the first to make it out of her stasis chamber, was crawling for command and beginning to stand. Her footing failed, and she reached for a handhold on the airlock but missed. Her head slammed violently into an access panel, and blood streamed from her lip, impaled by her own incisor during the impact. It flowed zig-zag onto the floor, painting the carnival-ride shape of gravity in bright red.

Greg made it to his hands and knees but no further, as he was slammed into the ship's hull for his efforts. His rotator cuff was twisted and sprained during his failed attempt to catch his sideways fall. His ribs were visibly compressed and likely broken as he landed on a lockdown turnbuckle for the chamber.

Jennifer reached for the handholds again, lifting herself off the panel and making her way to command. She was visibly pissed off.

"Kassy! STATUS! John! Stabilize this ship!" she yelled, overpowering the Master Alarm with an infuriated will.

"We're trying. There was a navigation failure, a kernel panic. We're nutating; the Hab-Ring hasn't compensated," Kassy replied, second-guessing herself. Was it a mistake to disengage the void drive?

Jennifer finished pulling herself to the Command module and secured herself into a flight chair. The rest of the crew, realizing walking was impossible, crawled the entire way using the wall handholds.

Within the VR space, John said, "Damnit Kassy, is that Proxima? We're too close!"

"Spectography says yes, we're in the Proxima system. We came out too late, we're heading above the poles of the star."

They were on the Proxima system's ecliptic plane but they'd disengaged the void drive too late. Instead of being months outside the system, they were deep inside it, sitting right on top of Proxima. Something had gone terribly wrong with navigation as Kassy feared.

"Monitor 1. What in the hell is that? Can you get us around it with maximum nuclear and chemical thrust?" Jennifer said.

"It's a Coronal Mass ejection. We're not stabilized yet, we can't apply thrust, we can't control the vector, it'd do more harm than good," Kassy said.

"This will be one for the telescopes on Earth," William said, his eyes wide in terror. "We might be fucked."

"The hull is becoming ionized, we're suffering heavy particle bombardment; electronic systems are rebooting, they won't listen to me; they can't keep up," Kassy said.

The coronal mass ejection fired electrons and heavy particles like protons with astounding energy into space and directly into Maxwell's Demon, subjecting the radiation shielding to impacts beyond its design. Proxima's powerful magnetic fields twisted out, around, and back on themselves, wreaking havoc with systems onboard the ship and threatening the integrity of the very fields that contained the precious void particle sandwiched between the FTL drive plates.

"Guys ... this is not good," William slurred, frantically moving through status screens for the Drive-Ring.

Additional alarms warbled on top of the Master Alarm.

"We're losing the dedicated thought model for reactor one's containment; it's attempting to restart.

Oh shit!

We're losing all of the reactor module electronics; the reactor plasma is losing shape. I need to shut down that reactor," William yelled.

"Do not shut down the reactor!" Jennifer said, holding onto her seat.

New alarm lights illuminated across other system consoles, including life support. EmDee began spinning in new directions, just as John was bringing wobble under control. The reaction control thrusters and dynamic weight distribution systems were failing and rebooting, undoing all the work he'd done.

"Why? Why can't we shut the reactor down?"

"Because in CoreX's testing they restart less than 50% of the time. That's why!" Jennifer said.

"Goddamn you Jennifer, I was told they solved that."

"It's not solved, and now you know. Someone silence that fucking Master Alarm!" Jennifer yelled.

"The reactor control model didn't have a chance to go into low confinement mode, we're running full hot."

"Then do it now, go to L-mode1, William," Jennifer said. "John and Kassy, get us stabilized again!"

"We're trying. The communications bus error rate is too high; we can't get enough commands through to the thruster modules, they're stuck on auto," Kassy said.

"Then they're doing a shitty job. Screw this. I'm shutting down the Hab-Ring spin, it's not doing us any favors," Jennifer said.

Reaction control jets around the Hab-Ring fired, trying to stop the ring's rotation, but the systems were too confused to do it correctly. Interlock rams designed to hold the Hab-Ring in place when it was stopped slammed outward, unable to find their slots against the still rotating ring. A metal-chalkboard screeching sound resonated through the hull of the entire ship as the rams scraped along the inner suspension hub.

"Multiple ELM failures, reactor one plasma containment is faltering; the reactor divertor plate is going to take a hit," William yelled.

"Kassy! Where is the reactor plasma AI? Get it back online!" Jennifer said.

Within the confines of reactor one, amid the swirling, frenzied mass of plasma, excited to energy levels where the most wondrous and destructive manifestations of particle physics live, a thin tendril of unmanaged helium nuclei escaped the magnetic fields corralling their path in the toroidal core, and smashed into the reactor divertor wall, spalling and ionizing it. The ejecta contaminated the plasma stream further, diminishing its ability to be managed by the flailing thought models in charge of the magnetic containment systems.

Springing into their respective holding clamps, the Hab-Ring interlock rams finally succeeded in their purpose, but with the unfortunate condition that the Hab-Ring spin was not fully stopped when they did so. The rapid cessation of the ring's rotation produced agonizing shear forces on the crew in that instant before the residual angular momentum was transferred to the entire ship.

"No! Not again," John yelled, as the ship was ripped out of his control with a new spin vector.

"We just ionized a chunk of the reactor divertor plate! There's a deposit on the core walls, and we have plasma contamination; if we don't shut down the reactor, I'm not sure if it will be salvageable for power generation," William said, his face buried in a status screen.

"Wait! I'm getting queries from reactor one's thought model, it's back online," Kassy said.

Jennifer's chair webbing drew tight as the spin induced artificial gravity ceased, and weightlessness took over.

"We're coming clear of the coronal mass ejection event. I have attitude control! We're stabilizing," Kassy said.

"Thank god. I vomited enough coming out of stasis," Sarah said.

"Jennifer, we don't have enough velocity for orbit, we're going to fall back into Proxima. What should we do?" Kassy said.

"Can you make a transfer orbit, anything stable? Proxima B possibly?"

"Plotting ..." Kassy said.

"Status reports, all systems," Jennifer said.

"Life support has survived, but we'll need to check the water and food supplies for radiation contamination," Sarah said.

"We lost some transient memory storage due to hard radiation, I'm remapping it. There's no permanent damage," Greg said.

"I wish I had better news," William said. "Reactor one has a breach in the reactor wall from the plasma strike; fast neutrons are leaking. The reactor thought model is up, and we are in L-mode 1, but I don't know if it's stable."

"Jennifer, a fast transfer orbit to Proxima B using 80% of our chemical reserves is possible. Lower cost transfers are available," Kassy said.

"Show me all the plots on monitor two, Kassy ...

Months? Those are beyond our life support profiles. Will we have the power to run the stasis chambers, William?"

"Not unless we repair reactor one, or reconfigure the Drive-Ring power grid from reactor two, which completely rules out FTL ever again."

"I don't like the fuel cost, but until we get a better assessment of our status, that's as good a place to park as any. The sooner we change our vector, the cheaper the cost. Execute the fast transfer," Jennifer said.

Primary axis chemical thrusters located around the Drive-Ring activated and sent a low frequency rumble into the ship. The Captain of Maxwell's Demon looked around the command module, running a sleeve of her flight suit across a bloody lip, and looked disdainfully at it.

"Wipe the vomit and blood off yourselves, get hydrated, and meet in the Hab module in fifteen minutes," she said.

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