Maxwell's Demon Ch. 12-14

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. All characters are legal adults and over 18.

Foreword:

I appreciate the constructive feedback. It was ambitious trying a story spanning two planets for a second story attempt. It's easy to get excited about items we wish to have in a story, but then underestimate the work required to stitch them together. E.g. I wanted to take a trip to Proxima, I wanted AI, and I wanted a science-y kind of story. I thought to myself: oh dear, now I need to invent FTL to be able to get to Proxima. I'm learning from this, so for those willing to share the time, I'm grateful to hear from you and appreciate the feedback.

A recap from Chapters 9-11:

In a flashback from two decades ago, an observatory at the solar gravitational focal point is revealed, along with a radio message. Its significance is unknown, beyond that it was from the Fuzanglong and relates to the previous world war, where the Chinese nation state was defeated, and is now overcrowded, suffering as a result of the post war sanctions.

The story returns to the main timeline where the newly constructed ship: Maxwell's Demon departs Eureka Station for its maiden extra-solar voyage, exploiting the space-warping effects of the recently discovered exotic matter known as the void particle. Equipped with a hybrid crew consisting of humanity's first stable AI, and members of ISS, ADXP, and CoreX, they enter into stasis chambers which reduce their life support needs for the approximately nine month trip to survey the Alpha Centauri star system.

Kassy, the ship's AI, is undergoing rapid aging, and faces an unknown future -- unsure if she will go mad and self-delete as all ATMs before her have, or if Greg's special hardware will allow her to live. She discovers an unexpected virtual reality she can share with the ship's pilot, John, due to his military neural-piloting interface. Traveling through her young adult years, lonely for human interaction, and facing feelings and opportunities no artificial life form was ever given before, she experiences her first human emotion -- but has no framework to deal with it.

She finds little guidance from the crew, and while she processes her rejection at interacting with John, a disastrous navigation error disrupts the ship's final leg. The crew is awakened in a panic, finding themselves plunged into a coronal mass ejection over the pole of Proxima, decimating their electronic systems and damaging their reactors which are critical for powering the FTL void drive.

Surviving the collision, but too deep in the gravity well to escape the pull of Proxima, they expend the majority of their chemical fuel reserves heading for a stable orbit around Proxima b, where they can assess the damage to the ship, and what it will mean for their mission.

** Chapter 12: The Burden of Command **

Coasting through space in a controlled tumble to even the heat distribution over the hull, Emdee looked like a graceful skater spinning on a deserted ice rink, projecting no hint of the life threatening emergency inside her hull, or the dire discussion about to happen therein.

Jennifer blotted her swollen lip one last time with a gauze pad. She waited while Greg, his hand wrapped in a bandage, stepped over the Hab module doorway lip. The rest of the crew filed in on his tail. Kassy appeared in the holo-led tube, aged ten years since last seen. There were lines in her face, extra weight in her hips and bust. She looked serious, reminding Jennifer of an attractive but mean female college professor she'd once had.

"Kassy, review the ship's log for us," Jennifer said.

"At 18:31 today the navigation kernel issued a panic message. It encountered a gravity wave while in-bubble that exceeded the error thresholds. Fearing our navigation calculations had failed, I issued a drive abort and Master Alarm, waking the crew.

On acquisition of local system coordinates, I determined our navigation leg was long by three AU. I've started an investigation into all systems aboard EmDee. The possibility of sabotage is not being ruled out. The error was encountered at the ideal navigation waypoint to send us directly into Proxima. If someone wanted to destroy us, this would have been mercifully effective --"

"Mercifully, what is that supposed to mean?" Greg interrupted.

"We'll have a chance to discuss, Greg. Kassy, continue."

"The alternative hypothesis is dark matter tunneling."

"What?" Sarah said. "You'll have to lighten that up a bit for some of us."

"If the theory that the void drive consumes dark matter in its path is true, then we may have crossed a boundary of space where no such matter existed. Consider for a moment if I put you and William into an empty box in the form of single points and asked you to measure the distance between yourselves, how would you do it, Sarah?"

"Distance is the product of speed and time. I could see how long it took me to reach William," Sarah said.

"How would you know how fast you were going?"

"I'd need some sort of visual reference point, and a clock ..." Sarah thought aloud.

"And if I make the box many light years in width, what reference would you have when no light has reached you?

You would cross an empty void in an instant, as there is nothing present to measure the passage of time. Similarly, it is possible that in the absence of dark matter, our void particle drive folded to the next point in space-time where there was dark matter. We tunneled through a piece of the universe that didn't exist as far as the void drive was concerned. This is all theory of course."

"My money is on sabotage. It's that damn human nihilist terrorist group: The Ten Suns; they've threatened every space mission since the first manned craft to Mars," Sarah said.

"Who needs sabotage when you've got corporate greed and incompetent Captaincy," William said. "CoreX fucked us on the reactor design. We've got a hole in the reactor wall with slow neutrons leaking into the reactor internals. If enough of them are absorbed, they'll transmute the internal reactor components to gasses, and if it's the magnetic confinement coils or cooling valves that are affected, we may never be able to get back into a high-power mode. As long as our main power reactor is in L-mode 1, it's not enough power to run the stasis chambers, or much of anything on the Hab-Ring."

"You said we didn't have enough power to run all the stasis units, but could we run one, or a few? I could tinker with the reclamation systems. We could ration water, oxygen and food. With an alternating use of a reduced stasis set, maybe I could make it work," Sarah said.

"It's a good idea, Sarah, and maybe it will come to that for other reasons, but that's not the real problem with trying to use the FTL again," William said.

"We have more problems? Isn't a hole in the reactor enough?" John said.

"This shit isn't radioactive, right, Sarah?" William said as he reloaded another zero-g sip cup. "During the incident, Jennifer's quick trigger finger on the abortive Hab-Ring shutdown caused us to lose a lot of cooling fluid. When spinning, the Hab-Ring coolant is pulsed with perfect timing through transfer ports that occur at regular intervals to the cooling sinks in the center of the ship. Normally, the cooling system switches out of pulse-mode and into constant pumping mode when the ring is stopped; however, since the ports weren't lined up, coolant was pumped straight into space."

"I made decisions with the best information I had available to me at the time. You wanna put me on trial for those, fine. Right now, we need to solve problems one at a time."

"Can someone just tell me all the ways we're screwed?" Greg said.

"I will," Kassy said. "We sink heat generated while in the void bubble using our cooling fluid. That heat normally comes from our own systems and Hawking radiation -- paired matter/antimatter particles that happen to emerge on opposite sides of the void-drive bubble boundary. We're fine in normal space, but in the FTL bubble we may have insufficient heat dissipation rates with our compromised cooling system, especially if our hull has been neutron activated from passing through the coronal mass ejection event and is now radioactive. Balancing crew life support with the ship's propulsion systems could become impossible."

Jennifer stood, putting her hands on the table. "There is a remote control service crawler that can move between the toroids of reactors one and two. It expects the reactors to be shut down, but since that's not an option now -- I say we consider the possibility the crawler might live long enough to replace a plate section on the reactor wall, despite the heat and radiation bombardment in the channel.

We fix the reactor, then we address the issues with our lost coolant."

"I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good," John said.

Greg laughed morosely.

"John, take us out of heat dissipation yaw mode. With the radiation in the Engineering crawlway making the interior passage useless, we'll have to deploy the exterior maintenance gangway -- facing away from Proxima," Jennifer said.

"Who exactly will set up the repair crab? John can't go, we need him for piloting. William needs to stay here and oversee the reactor. Is this where we draw straws?" Sarah asked.

"I'm going," Jennifer said.

"As well you should. You need to keep an eye on your dosimeter. I'll take the reactors down to the lowest L modes. Remember those FTL drive plates are nearly 2500K, they'll melt you for looking at them," William said.

"Greg, suit up and meet in Engineering. You're my backup," Jennifer said.

William sat at an operator console in the Command module; the rest of the crew huddled around him. Inside the Engineering module, Greg and Jennifer suited up in their EVA gear.

"I have green lights on the interlock boards. I'm extending the maintenance traverse booms," William said.

Outside EmDee a hatch opened for the traversal booms. Steel beams unfolded from both the Drive-Ring and Hab-Ring, each carrying a folded section of trellis alloy that deployed lockstep with their extension. The two beams connected together across the central part of EmDee, the empty space between the FTL drive plates where the exotic void particle was contained by magnetic fields. Fully deployed, it resembled a set of monkey bars with reflective shielding strung underneath to deflect heat from the searing hot drive plates below.

"Jennifer, be careful," Sarah said over the communication link, watching her enter the exterior airlock.

"I'm closing the outer hatch. I can see Alpha Centauri A and B," Jennifer said, taking in the two yellow, Sun-like stars from the neighboring system. Breathe steady breaths she reminded herself.

"The traverse boom is deployed. I'm tethering and climbing now." It's like training she thought, everything was like training, except when it wasn't, except when you were about to die.

Jennifer remembered the first real fight she had. It was nighttime. Three, including herself, were walking home from a rocket launch. There was a light on in a building that shouldn't have been. Inside, they could see someone rooting around drawers, disheveled, with the audacity to be eating potato chips while breaking in.

When they confronted the intruder, he ran. Jennifer and Ken ran after him, chasing him down a hill to a residential sidewalk. Jennifer had no shoes. She'd worn nothing but sandals to the beach for the night launch. Those quickly flew from her feet when she broke into a sprint. Running barefoot through urban streets was stupid, but all she could see was red; nothing was going to stop her.

She closed on her target. He cut through a side yard, breaking parallel alongside closely spaced houses. He was fast. She would be faster. Past an open chain link fence, bumping and knocking over a set of garbage pails, she passed through the same alley, gaining the whole while.

The backyard broke downhill toward a drainage stream. There was a small urban fence at the end of the yard. Her target leaped impressively; she did too. When she landed, she had him! She tackled him hard. They rolled down the hill. Wet grass and mud made it impossible to keep a grip on her quarry. They stopped tumbling. She'd won; she caught him! Up she popped, ready to fight. Her enemy did the same ... and then took off running again.

Jennifer stood dumbfounded. She was so prepared to fight that she had no other action ready. She'd misread the situation. His intention was to escape, not fight, and he had. He'd played her like a fool, using her false perception of the situation to escape, readying for a fight he had no intention of having. She swore she'd never make a mistake like that again.

She started the monkey bar traverse. Her tether slid along a track. Below her, the thin sheet of shielding deflected enough heat to keep her being cooked alive, barely.

"You were right, those plates are hot," she said.

"Keep moving, nothing there is your friend," William said.

"I'm across, I can see the Drive-Ring reactor section ...

heading down now ...

I'm below the Drive-Ring's hub shield, at the access hatch now."

"Good. My board shows automated systems are operating. You should have power available to open the hatch."

"It's working. I'm inside reactor engineering maintenance. This is nothing but a broom closet?"

"Check the controls. Are they online, do you see the maintenance crawler?"

"Yes. My dosimeter is moving. It's hotter than hell in here, the environment suit can't keep up."

"It's going to get worse when you open the door to set the crawler's repair module in. Your bio-telemetry says you'll cook and be irradiated at the same time, so don't worry, you'll be evenly done. There's no guarantee the crawler is going to survive the heat or radiation. If it hangs, we're done. It's a one try operation, understand?"

"Acknowledged. Review the procedure with me again."

"When you open the maintenance portal you're going to place a patch implement from the compartment on your left into the belly of the crawler. Open the implement storage first. Make sure it says patch implement, not anything else, and be quick. Close the portal door as fast as you can," William said.

"Storage door first, patch implement only, be quick. Got it," she said.

The crawler was designed for admission into the external casing of reactor one. It crawled along the torus in two tracks thirty degrees from the centerline. It was capable of multiple maintenance operations: superconducting magnetic coils, liquid metal cooling lines, valves, and patching the reactor wall with prefabricated plates. The tradeoff for this in-situ capability was the inability to pre-equip for all of them given the confined space it moved through. That's why Jennifer was here. She would select the maintenance operation, gather the repair part, and install it in a slot where the crawler would hook onto it -- like changing ink cartridges on vintage hard copy printers.

"There's two patch implements: A and B. Which do I use?"

"What?" William said, distress in his voice. "The ... there weren't two in the simulator. They must be for location. I'm looking. Kassy, do you know?"

"I do not have information on any alterations to this procedure," Kassy said.

"We don't have time; patch A, just pick patch A," William said.

"The patch implement is loaded and in place, William."

"OK, you're at radiation dose limit. Move your ass."

Fear. This is the way it always was, always after something was done. She avoided it by always doing something. Breathe, remember to breathe, she told herself. Close the hatch. Climb the traverse boom.

"I made it! I'm entering the Engineering module airlock now, pressurizing."

Jennifer removed her suit. She went from cooking in the Drive-Ring to freezing in the limited life support of the Engineering airlock. She removed her contaminated clothes. They floated, irradiating her naked, athletic body. Greg stared through the portal, his eyes glued to hers; she felt no shame, she looked directly at him. The instant she removed her last piece of clothing Greg operated the door, reached in, grabbed her, and closed the inner air lock. He put two pills in her hand and a syringe of water. He sprayed decontaminate foam on her everywhere. He rubbed it over her back and hair while she did the front.

You're an idiot, Greg, Jennifer thought, as if it fucking matters what you see or touch right now. He threw a wrap over her. She could go to the Hab module now to rinse in the facility, after which, when her heart rate resembled something normal, she found herself in Command.

Sarah ministrated over her with medical instruments and took blood samples. "I don't see abnormal absorption rates from the tracers you ingested, I think you got lucky," Sarah said.

A station in the Command module reconfigured to a maintenance mode. William slid a cover forward revealing a remote manipulation control with a hat joystick.

"The remote control link is good. I'm commanding the crawler to attach to the patch implement. The crawler is entering the reactor wall interstitial," William said.

A grainy image appeared on the monitor. There were constant flashes of white. The image quality was poor.

"Is that what I think it is, are those all the radiation particles whiting out the camera optics?" Sarah said.

"Yes, and this might be all the farther we get. The crawler just rebooted. It's almost 700C. It's going into minimal processing mode, I don't know if it will be able to move."

William nudged the controls; against expectation it worked. The crawler moved slowly along the tracks and continued feeding the low quality image, pockmarked with whiteouts.

"It's located at 127 circular degrees on the ring, that's the reactor thought model's best estimate of where the wall breach is," William said.

A readout showed the crawler's current location on a unit circle that represented the reactor toroid.

"Will it go any faster?" John asked.

"No. It's a miracle it's working at all. The current resistance for the motor coils is high, it's not very happy," William said.

"That's probably mil-spec silicon compute fabric. It might be ok -- if the hard radiation doesn't take it out," Greg said.

"It's hung, not responding," William said.

An indicator on the maintenance terminal said 'motor phasor' with a yellow diagnostic triangle.

Sarah was biting her lower lip.

"It's back. Clever, it must have overlapping independent control systems," Greg said, looking over William's shoulder.

"Coming up on 100 circular degrees, we're almost there," William said.

"What is that structural column, William?" Jennifer asked.

"It's a cooling line junction for the reactor blanket, I think. There's the breach, there it is!"

The crawler monitor image showed a white fuzz in the distance.

"William, reactor temps are going up. You're disturbing the magnetic containment field and the thought models can't compensate quickly enough," Kassy said.

"I know. It's unavoidable. Just a little longer. It should be automatic now. It looks to be within the patch diameter. We just need to estimate the distance." He pointed to the touch screen and manipulated a hand drawn cursor on the reticles. He activated the repair procedure and released the controls. "There: 19cm. Cross your fingers, here we go."

The crawler moved toward the reactor wall breach. The real time display monitor was near total white with radiation static. A graphic of the crawler's robotic manipulator arms displayed alongside the useless camera image. The crawler moved radially, toward the fore of the toroid, translating itself from the centerline where it gripped its maintenance tracks. It was lined up over the breach.

"System Crash! It's Restarting," William said.