Welcome back to our Serial Sunday, featuring Superluminary, a wonderful science fiction tale by John C. Wright that we’re pleased to present as a serial each Sunday here on Fandom Pulse.
Episode 12: Defusing the Supernova
From the remote safety of his secondary brain, Aeneas watched as his mother patiently carried out the inhuman thought-surgery on his primary brain, reducing its free will to nothing, killing it while keeping it alive.
“You may restore his voluntary nerve use, Lord Pluto,” said Venus. “He now has no ability to do anything voluntary.”
Aeneas opened his eyes. Lady Venus gave her son a wink, and put his signet ring back on his finger. Control of the molecular engines systems allowing him to reorganize his body at will was restored to him.
Aeneas stood when told to do so. He did not need to playact or pretend to be an automaton. All he had to do was not interfere when the primary brain, which was an automaton, acted.
Lord Neptune said, “What is this? You returned his signet?”
Venus said, “To defuse the nova bomb ticking in the core of the sun requires the authority of the Lords of Creation. Besides, I never taught him how to read.”
Lady Luna said, “If the family realizes you Elders lobotomized one of us, all your children would rise up to overthrow you.”
Lord Jupiter said sardonically, “It is a family tradition, isn’t it?”
Lady Luna did not laugh.
Jupiter scowled. “That does not include you, does it, daughter?”
She said, “I cannot forgive what you have done to Aeneas! You said he would be unharmed!”
He laughed heartily. “Well, there he stands! Fit as a fiddle!”
She turned her back on her father and said to Lady Venus, “Can it be reversed? Once you are done with him?”
Lord Neptune, who was nonchalantly inspecting the fingernails of his blue, webbed hands, answered instead. “Once we are done with him, Penthesilia, we are back to square one. If we let him live, he enslaves us, whether he wants it so or not.”
Lady Venus said stiffly, “If…?! You agreed not to harm him. That was our deal.”
The masked lord, Uranus, interrupted, “How long will it take him to defuse the dark mass? Can Aeneas answer questions?”
Lady Venus said, “I have established the nerve paths so that he can answer direct questions on any topic, even explain what he can do with his warptech, except he will not teach anyone else specifics. None of us learn his arts! That is as we agreed. He will obey direct commands from a family elder in a flexible, even in an imaginative, fashion. If you ask him to make suggestions, he will do so, but not if not asked.”
Aeneas heard his voice answer: “I don’t know how long, or even if defusing the sun can be done at all. I have not inspected the singularity bomb, nor been given any tools. To reach into a singularity, I must have a warpcore twenty thousand cubic centimeters in pre-collapse volume.”
Lord Pluto said, “I can estimate. Months. A year. Longer. As for resources, each of us must place all the wealth of the worlds we rule at his disposal.”
Lady Ceres said, “You’re joking!”
Pluto turned the cyclops-lens of his faceless helmet toward her, “I never joke. Aeneas just said the human race has to produce a sphere of neutronium is roughly the size of Halley’s Comet. Given the mass per cubic centimeter of neutronium, this is eight million trillion grams. It must be collapsed it into a singularity in a controlled fashion, and then rotated it at lightspeed to produce the Tipler frame-dragging effect. So the expense is the same as accelerating Halley’s Comet to ninety-nine percent of lightspeed. The method is something only Aeneas now knows. When Japan built a modern surface navy able to defeat the Czar, or the Americans built the atom bomb, or the Soviets enacted a space program, it required a major commitment of their available resources. Our task is proportionally greater. Whether the Solar System civilization has sufficient resources or not remains to be seen.”
Lord Saturn said, “It is our good fortune that ours is an autocracy ruled by one family, or otherwise coordinating such an effort would be impossible.”
Lady Venus said, “Aeneas is to be released to me afterward! That was our deal!”
Jupiter smiled a genial smile, and said, “Not to worry! I’ll keep an eye on Lord Neptune, and make sure he tries nothing to harm the boy.”
Lord Neptune said, “And who will keep an eye on you, brother? I do not wish you to winkle the secret of the Final Science out of him! There should be two watchmen, so that they can watch each other as well as you. I nominate Lords Saturn and Uranus.” He turned to the white-bearded Saturn and masked Uranus. “What say you?”
Saturn and Uranus were members of Neptune’s faction. With Mercury and Brother Beast missing from the discussion, Jupiter was outnumbered. The family vote went against him. Saturn and Uranus were assigned, along with Jupiter, to watch Aeneas.
The Empire of Man often employed the lifeless or the mindless for manual labor or routine intellectual tasks. Some were abioforms, that is, vat-grown pseudo-organisms existing in the shadow condition of unlife that had never been alive. Others were necroforms, that is, felons guilty of capital crimes who, after execution, were trapped in unlife and required to make restitution. A third group, like Aeneas, were anthroforms, that is, living men whose minds had been neuro-electronically lobotomized to non-volition.
The treatment of such human-shaped tools was routine. Aeneas had a medical closet where he was stored, a nutritious diet, and an exercise regimen. Brother Beast, who understood more biotechnology than even Aeneas, was called in to help with the diet and conditioning of the various organs in Aeneas’s nine foot tall body no one else understood.
He often smiled strangely into the dead face of Aeneas, and took special care to see to his bodily comfort. But if he suspected anything, he said nothing.
Weeks turned into months. Aeneas lived as an undead, without leisure, entertainment, conversation, or distraction. Ironically, it was less strict than what Brother Beast might endure in a monastic cell, or Lord Mars in boot camp. And the intellectual problem of organizing the whole solar system in a massive campaign was the first real work Aeneas had ever done in his life. He was fascinated.
The work was as slow as Lord Pluto had warned. Aeneas needed tools and materials unknown to human technology, which could only be built out of unknown materials with other unknown tools.
It was as if Piltdown Man knew how to build a space rocket, but he had to explain how to make iron axes and shovels to his tribesmen, so they could start felling trees and digging ore needed to erect a Bessemer furnace needed to smelt alloys needed for drill heads needed for oil rigs needed for rocket fuel. But iron axes needed bronze tools to make them, which needed copper tools.
The earlier parts of the project took longest. Building a supercollider that entirely circumnavigated the sun just inside the orbit of Mercury, for example, required the countless mountains and icebergs of the Oort cloud be hauled inward, and atomically reorganized.
It was the largest scale structure the human race had ever engineered.
Not new elements were to be constructed in output mouths of this monster, but new subatomic particles. Spherical particle shells were recombined into cylinders, cones, or cubes useful for building new fundamentals. These fundamentals were not elements: a cone containing a proton at the apex and a skirt charged with one electron is not a hydrogen atom, nor a cylinder with one antigraviton for an axis with one graviton forming the surface.
The fundamentals had to be combined into Dark Energy Materials, neutrino chains and antineutronium lattices and more exotic formations, with electrical and gravitational properties impossible to normal matter.
Due to the neuropsionic particles given off by Sol, necroforms could not be used anywhere in the inner system. Automatons lacked imagination. Thus, living human beings had to do the work. So a vast work force had to conscripted and motivated.
In this post-scarcity economy, work was never done out of necessity. The three hundred separate races had been designed each to serve one family member alone. Now all must work with discipline and unity toward a larger goal.
Over these months, Aeneas attended many a family meeting, propped in a corner in case a technical question arose. He heard his two hundred cousins discuss what threat or lure could motivate so many to do something so much against their nature.
It was Lady Luna who offered the answer. Only the truth would serve: all must be told that the solar system was about to be obliterated. All would work together or all would die together.
Aeneas was pleased with her, but only at first. She packaged the emotional import of her message as dreams, and gave out dream-broadcast units for each cousin to force into the subconscious minds of his servant population. It was irresistible propaganda.
The truth worked, or the mesmeric dreams did. Aeneas, from his hiding hole inside himself, watched with grim satisfaction as a spirit of camaraderie inspired the solar system. Human beings were still pets, and that galled him. But like sheepdogs rather than lapdogs, now Man had work. The hopelessness was gone.
The Mercury-crossing asteroid 5786 Talos, a flying mountain half a mile wide, was hollowed out, set with gravity amplifiers, and filled with spaceman’s fog. This green fog was one of the more useful inventions of pantropy: a cloud of microscopic plantlife programmed to scrub and scent the atmosphere, and maintain the oxygen balance.
The warpcore rested in the middle of the workspace and laboratory of Talos. The warpcore occupied an armature of intersecting Tipler rings which, from an outside frame of reference, measured fifty yards wide.
Lords Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune were there. The army of technicians had gone, teleported by contortion pearls back to their worlds and moons. The three were alone with dead-faced, dull-eyed Aeneas on a gravity-opaque catwalk overlooking the warpcore.
Uranus said, “We are agreed? Only the combination of our three powers could have set up this deathtrap. I have altered the orientation of the matter inside Aeneas’ body toward the neuropsionic solar output; the matter will react when the Sol psychic rays return to normal, releasing Jupiter’s trigger, which has set the electrons to ionize. That ionization will power Saturn’s chronic particles to release and trigger proton decay. Every atom in his body is therefore a bomb. Any one of the three of us could disarm it, so we must be agreed.”
Aeneas of course had seen his uncles subjecting his body to what he had thought were medical tests, but no sense of his could detect what they had done. Dread grew in him: the trap was thorough, and he knew no way to undo it.
Saturn said, “Ghoulish to talk about it in front of him! What if he hears, deep down?”
Lord Jupiter said, “No matter. What could he do? We tell him to throw the switch. The warp field changes the black mass inside the sun to unrotate its polarity from antimatter to matter, and unfold its event horizon. The mass returns to normal. The solar output, including the psychic radiation, changes accordingly. When it passes through him, the radiation disintegrates his body atom by atom. No clues for Lady Venus to find.”
Lord Uranus said, “Brothers, what is the harm? If, for any reason, the sun is not cured, the solar output remains unchanged, and we command him to try again. But the moment he cures the sun, the sun obliterates him.”
Saturn stroked his beard. “What if he stands in the shade?”
Uranus forced his mask to smile. “No physical object blocks neuropsionic waves. Thought-screens such as those Lady Venus builds cannot block out these frequencies and magnitudes. It would be like trying to block cosmic rays with a silk parasol.”
So the three were agreed. Without looking at Aeneas, they shook hands and vowed vows.
Lord Uranus told Aeneas to proceed. Aeneas held up his ring. The Lords, watching carefully through their own rings, saw the orders given to the warpcore. None of the three could understand the meaning of the multidimensional topology symbols Aeneas fed into the servominds in the control board, but none fretted. A mindless man could not form the intention to deceive them.
Lord Jupiter smiled in good humor; Lord Saturn’s tired and old eyes were filled with malice; Lord Uranus’ mask hid his expression. But each, in his own way, was savoring the sadistic irony of having Aeneas mindlessly giving the order that would save the sun and kill Aeneas.
There was no hesitation. Aeneas gave the execution command.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told!
Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.
Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!
Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!
I enjoyed this book so much that I bought a copy. Thank you for offering this and introducing me to this author.
The double consciousness narrative here is really well executed. Watching Aeneas from his hidden secondary brain while his lobotomized primary acts out the family's orders creates this tense dramatic irony. What caught my attention was how the scale keeps escalating, from personal mind-control to planetary engineering, but the core tension stays intimate about wether a mindless person can somehow outsmart his overseers. I dunno if he's gonna pull it off but the setup with the neuropsionic radiation trap feels like a classic countdown situation.