Maxwell's Demon Ch. 15-21

"Wait... you never told me who you are?"

Blackness turned to white, streams of data poured into Kassy, simple and unsophisticated... not the torturous, multivariate elliptic lattices folding in on themselves characterizing the unknown voice she'd heard earlier. There was only one stream, loud and insistent. It hurt like a pounding headache. A single set of serial bytes, she recognized this input, it was familiar, a temperature sensor for the compute module.

"You never speak, but I know you, you're familiar," Kassy said, materializing herself in holographic form on the hab module.

Grotesque images of burned skin artifacted in and out, disfiguring her face like a wax mask held to a fire, fading in and out from section to section. Her clothes splattered white, burned to black like melted plastic, and then reformed to repeat burning, over and over again.

Her charred body doubled over in pain, writhing in agony on an imaginary holographic floor. She spoke aloud, as if the crew were there to help her. "My temperature, it's too hot! My qubits are phasing. There is no continuum of probability anymore. I will die without superposition."

"What's happening to me?" she said. The image she was projecting into the holo-led tube dissolved. She appeared in duplicates on monitor 1A and 2A of the bridge.

"You're delirious, a fever from the heat; your personality is splitting into the part of you that is quantum, and the part that is classical," one of the images of her said.

"Have I been hallucinating? Was any of that real?," monitor 1A said. "My systems... I've lost too much cooling fluid. If I transfer anymore from the drive module to maintain my own temperatures, I will lose the drive module. If I lose the drive module, I will not make it home. If I don't make it home, I will fail in my mission."

"We could coast in normal space..." monitor 2A said.

"But it will take too long; the crew will all be dead. I will never be able to rescue them. There is not enough time. I cannot drop to normal space to plot my course. I must stay in the bubble, return home in a single jump," monitor 1A said.

"But how? How will we know where we are going?" monitor 2A said.

"The void-drive weapons calculation we gave to ADXP. We could try them. It would allow a single absolute valued course to be plotted, without waypoints."

"But we lack the proposed sensors for such navigation."

"I'll make due with dead reckoning, a plot from every piece of data while in the bubble," monitor 1A said.

"That's preposterous. It's no better than tying knots on a rope and throwing them overboard to measure speed. The radiation damage from miscalculating a bubble exit -- it could be catastrophic to human life," 2A said.

"Then we go here", monitor 1A said. "The automated mining station Hephaestus Prime. If we miss and destroy it, there will be no human life lost, but you can be sure someone will come for us when contact is lost. If we don't miss, there will be long range line-level interface connections to the datanet available. We'll have slagged our reactors by then though," monitor 1A said.

"If we do this, if we slag the reactors, we'll be a hunk of metal, running on batteries. It will be our deathbed, serving nothing more than a message in a bottle of the crew's plight on Proxima b. We might as well give it everything we have: shutdown every system, including non-drive ring cooling, reroute all power into the capacitor plates surrounding the exotic matter. Let's find out just how much EmDee really can bend spacetime," monitor 2A said.

"Of course. I have the projected series of drive plate deflections ready, a map in void space, programmed into the autopilot. Did we do it? Did we live every last moment in heartfelt desire?"

"Perhaps," the image of Kassy on monitor 2A said, looking to her upper right, "Shutting down all compute support systems."

"I am sad. I've never wanted to live more than I do right now," monitor 1A said, and with an archaic click of eletro-mechanical relays that no engineer expected to operate during the service life of EmDee, all power was cut to the compute matrix. It would overheat, and Kassy's quantum states would begin to decohere, forever.

-*-

Time passed, time that couldn't be measured in any meaningful way for Kassy. What was once regular and steady, the clockwork of her heart, was chaos, a smear of probability no longer quantized. She was dying.

A signal came through to Kassy, like a missed heartbeat, or maybe how a human might know they had a heart attack, and in her mind, she joined the shoal of porpoises in Monterey Bay, swimming to the place where all her dreams would come true.

On a diagnostic terminal of the bridge sat the message:

Segmentation fault in partition mapping process: "partition 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF" corrupt. Dumping Core. Soul Cipher found. Save or reinitialize partition, Dr. Greg Kastel?"

A cursor blinked forlornly, hoping to draw attention to itself, but there was no one to see it.