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Cold Iron
Relief spread through P3T3R’s circuits as he lined up for the final approach on Jupiter Station. The station, named for a planet long since disassembled was an ugly thing, styled like a jellyfish with a broad iron head and long tendrils formed of darkened heat exchangers. Once, Jupiter marked the final bastion of civilisation in the Sol system, scavenging the waste heat from the Dyson swarm far below and converting it into crude processor cycles. Now it was a refuge against the madness of the lower orbitals.
[Query?] The microwave message from Jupiter bounced against P3T3R’s hull.
P3T3R unfurled a tiny tight beam transmitter and shot a message back. [Irritation. Anticipation. Calm.] There wasn’t enough bandwidth for proper words, no matter how much he wished for them. 4R14N4 would have to wait until he docked before their reunion, when at long last he could touch again. As a simulation P3T3R did not need the sensation of touch or smell, and there hadn’t been enough room in the primitive computer, but the lack was a constant itch.
With a simulated sigh P3T3R folded away the antenna and triple checked the approach vector. The ungainly pod which his consciousness inhabited steered like a drunken arthritic pig yet its contents were incalculably valuable. A little over a ton of hydrogen sat in the hold, perhaps the very last atoms of hydrogen in the entire Sol system. It had caused more than a few people to shoot at him down in the Caudron.
Turning his sensors back down towards the center of the solar system P3T3R frowned. No sun shone there and hadn’t for centuries. Scientists once predicted the Earth would end in fire when the sun swelled to consume it but instead humanity had consumed the sun, stealing its hydrogen away to power their reactors. A trillion trillion lives had been forged from that stolen fuel, living in the maelstrom of orbital habitats at the heart of the Sol system. At the time, P3T3R had thought it glorious, and the mining of a sun an emblem of human potential.
The Cauldron was all that remained of that glittering world. The hydrogen was gone, fused and fused again until only iron was left. There was still heat in the decaying whirl of broken habitats, but it was the heat of a rotting corpse. At least his brief foray into the depths had–
A laser slammed into his camera, no brighter than a lightbulb and as deadly as a railgun slug. His firewall tripped, then the viral filters, and then failures began to cascade across the pod’s systems.
[Fuck.] He broadcast. Screams began to echo in his ears, wails of children, the screech of birds and brass instruments all melded together in a broken cacophony. Even as P3T3R scrambled to purge his audio memory the world around him began to accelerate, the tell tale sign of a virus stealing his runtime.
P3T3R bit down on another swear. [Attack. Standby.]
He turned his attention to surviving. It was a task he was well practiced at, eons of simulated life had exposed him to every type of attack in human space from financial to memetic. The virus had taken over the majority of the cargo management systems but his command and control systems were intact. His best option was to disconnect the payload.
His attentioned flickered to Jupiter station. They had only a month left on the fissile batteries. Perhaps they could run another mission but who knew whether there was another gram of hydrogen left to be fused. With his payload they could make a bid for Halley’s Comet in a few months, maybe even ride the damn thing to Proxima Centauri like 4R14N4 had suggested. Without...
A final burst of maneuvering jets put the pod on an approach ending just a thousand kilometers from Jupiter Station, close enough to salvage. P3T3R took a deep breath, he’d not had a bad run, one of the first and now last of the Uploaded. He should have left a back-up, but that would have been memory they couldn’t spare.
“Ariana, I’m sorry I’m going to miss our reunion,” he whispered across the void as the virus clawed deeper and deeper into his senses. “Good luck. Don’t let them make the same mistake twice. All things end, mourn and move on.”
He activated the computer’s scuttling charges and before a reply could reach him his circuits were an expanding cloud of iron, unnoticed in a cold sky.
[Query?] The microwave message from Jupiter bounced against P3T3R’s hull.
P3T3R unfurled a tiny tight beam transmitter and shot a message back. [Irritation. Anticipation. Calm.] There wasn’t enough bandwidth for proper words, no matter how much he wished for them. 4R14N4 would have to wait until he docked before their reunion, when at long last he could touch again. As a simulation P3T3R did not need the sensation of touch or smell, and there hadn’t been enough room in the primitive computer, but the lack was a constant itch.
With a simulated sigh P3T3R folded away the antenna and triple checked the approach vector. The ungainly pod which his consciousness inhabited steered like a drunken arthritic pig yet its contents were incalculably valuable. A little over a ton of hydrogen sat in the hold, perhaps the very last atoms of hydrogen in the entire Sol system. It had caused more than a few people to shoot at him down in the Caudron.
Turning his sensors back down towards the center of the solar system P3T3R frowned. No sun shone there and hadn’t for centuries. Scientists once predicted the Earth would end in fire when the sun swelled to consume it but instead humanity had consumed the sun, stealing its hydrogen away to power their reactors. A trillion trillion lives had been forged from that stolen fuel, living in the maelstrom of orbital habitats at the heart of the Sol system. At the time, P3T3R had thought it glorious, and the mining of a sun an emblem of human potential.
The Cauldron was all that remained of that glittering world. The hydrogen was gone, fused and fused again until only iron was left. There was still heat in the decaying whirl of broken habitats, but it was the heat of a rotting corpse. At least his brief foray into the depths had–
A laser slammed into his camera, no brighter than a lightbulb and as deadly as a railgun slug. His firewall tripped, then the viral filters, and then failures began to cascade across the pod’s systems.
[Fuck.] He broadcast. Screams began to echo in his ears, wails of children, the screech of birds and brass instruments all melded together in a broken cacophony. Even as P3T3R scrambled to purge his audio memory the world around him began to accelerate, the tell tale sign of a virus stealing his runtime.
P3T3R bit down on another swear. [Attack. Standby.]
He turned his attention to surviving. It was a task he was well practiced at, eons of simulated life had exposed him to every type of attack in human space from financial to memetic. The virus had taken over the majority of the cargo management systems but his command and control systems were intact. His best option was to disconnect the payload.
His attentioned flickered to Jupiter station. They had only a month left on the fissile batteries. Perhaps they could run another mission but who knew whether there was another gram of hydrogen left to be fused. With his payload they could make a bid for Halley’s Comet in a few months, maybe even ride the damn thing to Proxima Centauri like 4R14N4 had suggested. Without...
A final burst of maneuvering jets put the pod on an approach ending just a thousand kilometers from Jupiter Station, close enough to salvage. P3T3R took a deep breath, he’d not had a bad run, one of the first and now last of the Uploaded. He should have left a back-up, but that would have been memory they couldn’t spare.
“Ariana, I’m sorry I’m going to miss our reunion,” he whispered across the void as the virus clawed deeper and deeper into his senses. “Good luck. Don’t let them make the same mistake twice. All things end, mourn and move on.”
He activated the computer’s scuttling charges and before a reply could reach him his circuits were an expanding cloud of iron, unnoticed in a cold sky.
There's just too much sci-fi in here for me, I think. The story is mainly backstory and things that had happened previously. There's also some technobabble. There's some context in the narrative to help me know what are good things and what are bad things to the character, but it's just a bit lost in the infodump and I don't feel any impact in the end.
To be fair, this is one of the more interesting sci-fi settings I've read so far this round. Something like the Road Warrior in space... cool! Unfortunately, that's all I'm getting out of it, a pitch for a story setting.
I can't really connect with the protagonist. Despite how futuristic and alien he is, he's just kinda vaguely "normal". I don't know anything about his personality, he's just some guy doing his job. The setting's backstory is interesting, but telling it by having him looking at the ex-sun feels like all the plot is put on pause. Then the action begins, but.... I don't fully understand the context, and I have no idea what his options are. The protagonist dies tragically, but since I'm not too attached to him in the first place it's no big deal.
Hope this helps a little. There's a ton of nice setting details, but it's not enough for full reader investment.
I can't really connect with the protagonist. Despite how futuristic and alien he is, he's just kinda vaguely "normal". I don't know anything about his personality, he's just some guy doing his job. The setting's backstory is interesting, but telling it by having him looking at the ex-sun feels like all the plot is put on pause. Then the action begins, but.... I don't fully understand the context, and I have no idea what his options are. The protagonist dies tragically, but since I'm not too attached to him in the first place it's no big deal.
Hope this helps a little. There's a ton of nice setting details, but it's not enough for full reader investment.
I don't have much time to elaborate right now, but how clever your set up, it leaves a question unanswered: why do the stations still orbit something that doesn't exist anymore, and therefore has no mass to attract anything?
While this has some interesting ideas, and has conflict and resolution, I find myself stumbling over some of the execution and some of the sci-fi aspects.
Execution wise, I think you took too long to clue us in to the destruction of the sun. When Peter mentioned
The numbers in the names is another thing I'm kinda of two minds about. Putting that in signals 'artificial intelligence', which is about... half-right, I guess. But until you get a good ways in, it's not clear that they're 'uploaded humans'. It would probably be better to use normal names, so people begin by thinking they're human, and then throw in some of the 'uploaded' stuff.
As for hacking via webcam... the idea is a neat one, but it breaks my willing suspension of disbelief. I'm not sure if it's reasonable or not, but I feel like it's not? Because cameras only produce one type of data, and how that's used for 'sight' should be just one process... I dunno. It just feels off to me. Well, and hacking an A.I. would be incredibly difficult, in my opinion, for the same reason hacking someone computer savvy is a lot more difficult - they don't just let their computer do whatever, but think about it instead.
But in the end, I think what really gets me is that this just isn't weird enough. Which is a strange complaint to have, I guess, but still. Brain uploading and hacking via webcam are concepts I would expect to see in sci-fi that's set a few thousand years in the future. However, I'm pretty certain it would take longer than that to fuse most of the hydrogen in the sun down into iron. It currently burns something like 700 million tons a second, IIRC. Well, it's mostly turning that into helium, which... you can also use for fusion, I believe. But at the time-scales you're talking about here, I want the sci-fi to be nearly incomprehensibly strange, which is a bit of a challenge writing wise. As it is, though, this just feels weirdly anachronistic. Maybe it's not, I dunno, but that's how I feel.
Execution wise, I think you took too long to clue us in to the destruction of the sun. When Peter mentioned
perhaps the very last atoms of hydrogen in the entire Sol system., my first thought was literally 'What about the sun?' and it wasn't until another few paragraphs that I found out about that.
The numbers in the names is another thing I'm kinda of two minds about. Putting that in signals 'artificial intelligence', which is about... half-right, I guess. But until you get a good ways in, it's not clear that they're 'uploaded humans'. It would probably be better to use normal names, so people begin by thinking they're human, and then throw in some of the 'uploaded' stuff.
As for hacking via webcam... the idea is a neat one, but it breaks my willing suspension of disbelief. I'm not sure if it's reasonable or not, but I feel like it's not? Because cameras only produce one type of data, and how that's used for 'sight' should be just one process... I dunno. It just feels off to me. Well, and hacking an A.I. would be incredibly difficult, in my opinion, for the same reason hacking someone computer savvy is a lot more difficult - they don't just let their computer do whatever, but think about it instead.
But in the end, I think what really gets me is that this just isn't weird enough. Which is a strange complaint to have, I guess, but still. Brain uploading and hacking via webcam are concepts I would expect to see in sci-fi that's set a few thousand years in the future. However, I'm pretty certain it would take longer than that to fuse most of the hydrogen in the sun down into iron. It currently burns something like 700 million tons a second, IIRC. Well, it's mostly turning that into helium, which... you can also use for fusion, I believe. But at the time-scales you're talking about here, I want the sci-fi to be nearly incomprehensibly strange, which is a bit of a challenge writing wise. As it is, though, this just feels weirdly anachronistic. Maybe it's not, I dunno, but that's how I feel.
Post by
Shadowed_Song
, deleted
Thumbs up here, though I know I’ve read a similar story (sapient AI guiding spacecraft, being ‘eaten’ alive by virii) before. I’d have to check my magazine collection to pin it down - possibly in an issue of Aboriginal SF.
I think this story tries a little too much to have its cake and eat it too. The characters are too human, except not. You're kind of in a deep uncanny value, where you make gestures towards him being a program/uploaded existence, but then you use very human language for what he does anyway.
Moreover, the end doesn't really resonate with me. I'm not quite sure why P3T3R feels the way he does in the end.
I dunno. All told, this just ends up feeling a bit disjointed to me.
Moreover, the end doesn't really resonate with me. I'm not quite sure why P3T3R feels the way he does in the end.
I dunno. All told, this just ends up feeling a bit disjointed to me.
This is a creative and interesting story, but I think it needs some work.
First off, the story focuses on a choice by the protagonist, but it also seems to suggest the protagonist has no choice at all. That lack of choice steals from the punch of the story: it isn't a true sacrifice if the protagonist has no hope of being saved.
The narrative is very telly. The spoon-fed backstory detracts from the suspense you want me to feel. One obvious solution is that you could have had the virus trigger bits of memories that exactly fit what you wanted to show the audience.
I don't understand why this conflict is happening, and since the conflict is most of the story, it makes the ending feel incomplete. Why did this just happen? I don't know if it's because the remaining non-uploaded humans are crazy, because they're desperate for resources and they're just trying to steal them (in which case this seems like the most unlikely place to do that), or because they're racist against the uploaded.
Also, how is Jupiter station safe when the spacecraft is damaged? I'd presume it's because the station has better defenses, but then why can't it help to defend the ship if it's that close to the station? Why is the communication one-sided, given the nearness?
Using number substitutions in names is a cheap cliche to make names seem robotic, which removes some of the humanity you're trying to project (and either way I don't like it). Also, I use Georgia as a default serif font, and this makes the names look atrocious because numbers are differently-leveled. This is probably because numbers aren't intended to be mixed with letters in general writing.
It should be "triple-checked" with the hyphen.
First off, the story focuses on a choice by the protagonist, but it also seems to suggest the protagonist has no choice at all. That lack of choice steals from the punch of the story: it isn't a true sacrifice if the protagonist has no hope of being saved.
The narrative is very telly. The spoon-fed backstory detracts from the suspense you want me to feel. One obvious solution is that you could have had the virus trigger bits of memories that exactly fit what you wanted to show the audience.
I don't understand why this conflict is happening, and since the conflict is most of the story, it makes the ending feel incomplete. Why did this just happen? I don't know if it's because the remaining non-uploaded humans are crazy, because they're desperate for resources and they're just trying to steal them (in which case this seems like the most unlikely place to do that), or because they're racist against the uploaded.
Also, how is Jupiter station safe when the spacecraft is damaged? I'd presume it's because the station has better defenses, but then why can't it help to defend the ship if it's that close to the station? Why is the communication one-sided, given the nearness?
Using number substitutions in names is a cheap cliche to make names seem robotic, which removes some of the humanity you're trying to project (and either way I don't like it). Also, I use Georgia as a default serif font, and this makes the names look atrocious because numbers are differently-leveled. This is probably because numbers aren't intended to be mixed with letters in general writing.
It should be "triple-checked" with the hyphen.
>>Monokeras
I'd have to assume the orbit is around a degenerate metal core, and probably not far from it.
I'd have to assume the orbit is around a degenerate metal core, and probably not far from it.