in other words. The earliest studies go back to the early twenty-first century, maybe earlier, when technologies like cell phone towers were first coming on-line. In four centuries, there’s never been a solid, proven link, but there was a lot of controversy on the topic when they started beaming both optical and microwave wavelengths down from the Geosynch solar reflector arrays.
For a century, now, we’ve slowly been winning the global climate battle against the New Ice Age, partly by warming the waters of the North Atlantic, and partly by focusing heat on the edge of the ice sheets, from Vancouver to Maine. Paula and I both were picking up some microwaves as we toured the edge of the ice cliffs, of course. That second sun in the southern sky, forty or so degrees above the horizon, marked the reflector array at Geosynch halfway up the space elevator, but any harmful microwave component was supposed to be so diffuse it shouldn’t have caused a problem. The nasty high-energy stuff is all focused farther north, and we should have been getting only a little of the halo fringe off the Mount Desert ice sheet.
And maybe it wasn’t microwaves at all. Maybe it just happened … which somehow was far more terrifying. If the dearest person in your life is going to die in your arms, you want there to be a reason.
I came real close to dropping out of FMF after that.
Hell, I came pretty close to dying myself.
Chapter Six
I’D BEEN LIVING WITH PAULA’S MEANINGLESS DEATH FOR THE NEXT year, which I suppose was better than the alternative, which was not living with her death. There was a time, there, after I got back to SAMMC, when I was thinking seriously of checking myself out. It’s simple enough to disable the safeguards in an N-prog, and custom-tailor a few billion nanobots to take you down into coma-level sleep before quietly shutting down all your CNS and cardiac functions. No pain, no awareness, nothing. You just go to sleep and never wake up. After about five minutes with no blood flow, your brain starts dying, degrading to the point where you can’t even capture the cerebral pattern any longer.
God, I wanted to die.
The problem was that I was afraid I would wake up.
I’d never been very religious. My parents were Reformed Gardnerians, which meant they believed in reincarnation, among other things. I’d never thought that much about it one way or another. So far as I was concerned, I’d live the usual three or four hundred years, then die, and then I’d find out what happened next, assuming that new medical advances hadn’t extended the expected human life span even further. No problem either way.
But I did start thinking about it after I lost Paula, thinking about it a lot, usually when I was alone in my rack-tube back at SAMMC, lying there in the claustrophobic dark thinking through, step by step, how I could reprogram my N-prog to let me kill myself. What if my folks were right? I’d slip off into a coma, the ’bots would shut me down … only that wouldn’t be the end. I’d wake up on the Other Side, realizing that whatever lessons I’d been supposed to face in this life were still there waiting for me. Shit, I might have to go through the whole thing all over again. You know what they say about reincarnation. It’s the belief that you keep coming back again and again and again until you get it right.
Worse than that, though: What if the pain didn’t go away?
The fact that Paula might be waiting for me on the Other Side did occur to me, of course, and for a while, there, it made the nanobot option damned attractive, let me tell you. I got as far as actually working out the program algorithms for my N-prog and assembling the hardware I would need.
But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I was afraid of the pain that went on and on, but I was afraid of the idea of dying, too. I didn’t want to live without her, but I didn’t want to die, either.
It didn’t help that I knew exactly where those feelings of loss and emptiness were coming from physically. We’ve known for several centuries now about the role played by the caudate nuclei—there are two of them, in either half of the brain—in the messy addiction we commonly refer to as being in love. Dopamine—that same neurotransmitter that Howell used to o-loop himself into convulsions—is emitted by the VTA and other areas of the brain and floods the caudal regions, which are tied in with the VTA circuit. Under the dopamine’s influence, we’re filled with an intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and the motivation to win awards in the form of attention and approval from our love interest. We’re able to stay up all night, to be bolder than usual, even to run insane risks when we’re showing off … all for the sake of love. Being in love, it turns out, actually is closely related to being addicted to drugs—and the withdrawal when the love interest drops you or dies can be as painful and drawn out as going cold turkey on a physical addiction.
The first week, I was numb. They gave me ten days’ compassionate leave. The funeral was there in San Antonio; after that, I went home to Ohio. I don’t remember a whole lot about that time, to tell the truth.
By the time I got back, my orders for North Carolina were in. Still feeling numb, but no longer thinking of ways to turn off the pain, I hopped the sub-O for Wilmington, and a billet with FMF Training Command.
And after that, I was way too busy to think that much about what had happened in Maine.
But one thing stayed with me, and continued to gnaw at me throughout the course. I’d come up short when Paula got hit with the stroke. Yeah, there’d been technical difficulties with a poorly programmed AI on the boat, and, yeah, there’s not a lot I could have done, even if we’d been shoreside in a hospital. But Gods, that feeling of abject helplessness …
It had me wondering if I was cut out at all for FMF.
SIX DAYS AFTER LEAVING STARPORT, WE WERE TEN ASTRONOMICAL units out from the sun, beyond the orbit of Saturn and traveling at better than 5,000 kilometers per second. The VR sim downloads were relentless and demanding, one possible scenario following the next as the training AIs hammered us with tactics while at the same time probing for weakness.
I think I did okay on the general stuff, treating Marines for a variety of wounds or other injuries while going on simulated patrols across simulated landscapes and encountering simulated ambushes. We must have approached the city of Salvation in fifty different situations—with the inhabitants welcoming us, with the inhabitants opening fire as we drew near, with the Qesh already in possession of the city and the sky patrolled by armored Qesh fliers. In fact, most of the ViRsims had the Qesh already in the city and waiting for us. By the time we made the transition to Alcubierre warp, after all, they’d already been on the planet for a couple of weeks.
One and a half billion kilometers from Sol, the local metric of space was flat enough that the Clymer could gather her figurative skirts up around her and slip into her own private universe. Nothing in the universe, neither material nor energy, can travel faster than light, but there’s nothing in the universal rules and regs that prevents space from doing so. In fact, we know that the fabric of space expanded far faster than c during the fraction of a second of universal inflation immediately after the big bang. The Alcubierre Drive, named for the Mexican physicist who first outlined the concept late in the twentieth century, enveloped the starship in tightly folded space. The ship is not moving at all relative to the space within which it’s resting; the bubble around it, however, slides through normal space at high multiples of the speed of light, and just happens to carry the motionless starship with it.
The idea is so weirdly counter-intuitive it makes my brain hurt. Fortunately, I just had to worry about field medicine, first aid, and the occasional dopamine cascade, not
