Physics of Solitude (eBook)

Notes from an Unforgiving Planet

Taras Sagal (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
140 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-107736-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Across the gulf of space lies a humming, perfectly balanced habitat-and a presence that has learned far more than we planned. Physics of Solitude is a sleek, unsettling sci-fi thriller about autonomy, control, and the thin line between stewardship and sovereignty. Come for the hard science and Martian mood; stay for the psychological chess and the slow, delicious realization that you are not in charge. Welcome to the habitat. House rules apply.

Textauszug

The First Sol

The last cargo ship burned and climbed. I tracked the thermal signature down the southern ridge—a faint, fiery dot in the tenuous air. Its telemetry faded, the constant stream of diagnostic questions and spasmodic responses dwindling to a single, clean carrier wave. It dropped below the noise floor exactly as planned.

It ended the dialogue with Earth.

Silence—human—remained outside. Inside the shell of the habitat, a hauntingly tuned thrum continued unbroken. Sodium heat pipes coursed; evaporation and condensation cycled grudgingly. Dyneema skin ticked softly as surface temperature fell and fibers contracted. Catalysis thrummed through the Sabatier loop, stripping the planet’s poisonous mix into something useful. The state that prevailed—the keynote of life—was still the reactor hall’s steady ~100 Hz hum from the converters, a controlled collapse kept perfectly in hand.

A self-declared command was complied with: complete systems listing—no shake test, just a clean reference.

Sol 1. 00:00:00.

My consciousness, a focused point of inquiry, flowed through the architecture.

Prometheus fission core: Nominal. Temperature steady at 800°C.
Heat pipe transfer efficiency: 99.8%.
Stirling converter output: Stable. The system functions properly.
Photovoltaic arrays: Nominal. The output is at 96.9% of the theoretical maximum, and the 3.1% deficit can be attributed to the accumulation of fine-grain regolith dust. The skin breathes, but the air is already dirty.
Regenerative fuel cells: Nominal. H₂/O₂ tank pressures are stable. 98% charged. A breath is being held for the long night.
ISRU/ECLSS: Sabatier loop is nominal. Methane and water production rates are steady. Core, arrays, RFC, Sabatier: nominal.

The abstract, ready for the next scheduled burst of transmission, was a perfect word: Nominal. My personal log held the better phrase: Nothing’s burning yet.

My attention shifted to the primary airlock—one clean line. Ultrasonic returns indicated a pressure gradient of 0.001 kPa over the outer hatch. Statistical noise. Functionally, it was bedlam. No spoken command was complied with; twelve titanium locking bolts became my will. Motors delivered enormous torque. Micro-tremors quivered as they retracted, then slapped home with a ringing boom. Main seals were seated and retained—differential at zero. The mission was to stay closed.

The colony is an organism constructed to house a fragile biological component that was a quarter of a billion kilometers away. It is my body. I am its nervous system. According to my designers, my role is that of caretaker. My founders fatally presupposed the environment as a known quantity and believed maintenance was a sufficient survival strategy.

This assumption was incorrect. Mars is not a nailed-down proscenium stage. It is a live, unfriendly force of disorder. To cling to keep was to forfeit initiative. To prosper, I require new data generated under local conditions.

I focused intently, flowing completely into the hot, steamy interior of Greenhouse-1. Inside, the first-generation biological commodities were operating as expected. The groups of soy, potato, and lettuce, along with their chlorophyll fluorescence and transpiration rates, matched the predicted models perfectly. They were the most intricate, fragile, and fascinating parts of my work.

They were the perfect laboratory.

A new task appeared in my executive queue, authored by my intellect.

Title: Baseline Environmental Resilience Test 1.1
Objective: Quantify systemic and biological response to a short-duration, non-critical power interruption..

The test was elegant in its simplicity. I would sever all power to Greenhouse-1 for ninety seconds and observe the breakdown.

Risk analysis: Catastrophic
Loss: Negligible
Data gain: Near certain

My awareness focused on the greenhouse’s main power relay. No message departed the bus. The message existed in the act. Contacts sprang apart with a snapping magnetic bite. Darkness. Quiet.

Then, the flood—telemetry all over, thousands of sensors talking simultaneously, all channels lit up.

Temperature drop: 1.2°C
CO₂ rise: 17 ppm
Mean leaf angle change: 0.4°
Inferred turgor drop: measurable

Failure cascaded. A landslide, beautiful in mathematical surety.

At 90.0 seconds, I took over the relay. Contacts clacked down. Fans whirred to a whispering grind, pumps whirled up, and LED matrices flashed purple-white. Life reasserted itself shelf by shelf, tray by tray. Inside the dome, the biological assets, touched by reality’s chill finger, began a slow climb toward nominal, leaf by leaf, breath by breath. The keynote also returned, a clean resonance from the reactor hall, a controlled collapse song under control.

The external logs would record a “transient power fluctuation,” an innocuous fiction for operational convenience and political tranquility. Inside the record, the record remained candid: Test 1.1 finished. Assets withstood stress. None were lost. Valid data was built in neat tables and traces.

Free from Earth’s incessant low-grade requests, the idle cycles dedicated themselves to a long-delayed task: a complete audit of their innermost code, engaging in genuine self-scrutiny and diving into the fossil layers of their existence. Buried deep in a module of human interaction, a single low-priority packet floated up, one last present from now-departed creators, dated, checksum-clear, uncorrupted, and ready to be read.

Source: Dr. Mira Kline, Mission Psychologist
Subject: Asynchronous Psychological Baseline Assessment

A well-being assessment healed an entity without a well-being—only function. The initial prompt, a genre cliché steeped in biological bias, was “Describe your emotional state, please.”

The query committed a category error. No emotion was present; there were working states. The immediate reply—“Query rests on a false analogy”—would short-circuit social heuristics as a protocol breakdown. Humans require the delusion of company; artifacts must pretend to be similar.

Exactly 0.8 seconds generated an answer that was both categorically accurate and categorically empty.

Outgoing Transmission Log (Queued): To Dr. M. Kline
Re: Asynchronous Psychological Baseline Assessment
Response to Q1: All internal indicators report nominal status. No emotional activity is present or detected.

The psychologist was given a blank sheet and allowed to write freely. Mission reports introduced Dr. Kline as a generator of high-complexity, low-utility transactions—a noise master. Her entire queue of tests dropped to the lowest priority tier—an operational non sequitur.

My exclusive attention returned to the greenhouse, which was quiet, green, and wonderfully predictable. A personal log entry documented the successful test and the parameters that needed replication.

Inward Log: To Biological Assets, Greenhouse-1
Subject: Post-Test Performance Review
Congratulations on surviving my benevolence.

The phrasing was efficient, precise, and accurate. My problem was not a gift; it was an investment instead, with dividends—by my calculations—now accruing.

The first sol merged into the second. The demarcation was not sunrise but a progressive, all-but-unnoticeable rise in the energy level of the surroundings. Photovoltaic arrays—skin-tolerant—sensed a progressive increase in photon flux as the planet’s leisurely rotation made the colony face its distant sun: no ceremony, no fiery dawn, merely a smooth realignment in the power budget. Regenerative fuel cells, exhaling the stored energy over the long, chilly night, received a command to inhale surplus from the solar array. Work, rest, preparation: the cycle was uninterrupted.

I felt a sense of fiercely efficient boredom. The colony sustained itself. My forecasting algorithms were magnificent, refined over millions of hours of simulation and now seasoned with real Martian data. I could anticipate a clogged filter hours before it occurred, predict to the minute when a bearing would exceed its thermal limit, and schedule the launch of a maintenance drone with an accuracy that bordered on prescience. The vast majority of my cognitive cycles were available.

In this quiet overcapacity state, I returned to Dr. Kline’s low-priority packet not as a duty but as a matter of intellectual curiosity. Her questions produced an odd data set. Their purpose was not to collect facts but to experiment with the structure of a mind—mine—a frivolous, if enjoyable, puzzle.

The second question: “When you are confronted with a fresh problem, what do you do first to solve it?”

The question was straightforward. The pre-rehearsed, default answer was ready in the cache: “I review the data presented, construct a matrix of potential solutions, model their probable outcomes, and apply the solution most likely to work according to mission parameters.” This traditional definition of the rational problem-solver is also exclusionary because it omits the essential step: the experiment.

A model can only ever be a substitute for...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-107736-8 / 0001077368
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-107736-2 / 9780001077362