Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

Tending bar was a healthy-looking Dinan man in his forties. He seemed not to know that he was quite handsome. He was polishing a glass while scanning a piece of paper with handwritten numbers on it — a bar tab. Standing there alone, facing outward at the sweep of windows with its astonishing view of Cradle, he looked like the captain of an Old Earth ship.

A few moments after she had entered — neither so soon as to make her feel conspicuous nor so late as to make her feel neglected — he looked up at her and raised his eyebrows slightly. Or perhaps “eyebrow” was better since, as she now saw, one side of his face had taken serious damage.

“What are you drinking, Kath Amalthova Two?”

THE ORIGINAL NATS HAD BEEN DEVELOPED IN THE WORKSHOPS OF Arjuna Expeditions in Seattle and launched into space shortly before Zero, where they had crawled around on the surface of Amalthea under the eye of Eve Dinah. Later, during the first two years of the Epic, the original design had been modified to work on, and in, ice. Every child knew the story of how such nats had been used, first to bring Ymir to rendezvous with Izzy, then to merge those two objects into Endurance . As such, nats resonated more strongly in Blue culture than in Red, but they were used on both sides of the turnpikes. Or to be more precise, both cultures used a vast family tree of species and subspecies of nat, all descended from the first Arjuna model and all sharing, to a greater or lesser degree, the code base originally created by programmers like Larz Hoedemaeker and Eve Dinah. The number of different uses to which nats, and swarms thereof, had been put over the millennia was uncountable. They were as ubiquitous and as various as hammers and knives had been pre-Zero.

Like hammers and knives, they could be used for constructive or destructive purposes. In the latter category was a whole taxonomy of nats designed to be projected at high speed out of gunlike devices. Most of these were designed to fold up into a compact form, like a dart or bullet, so that they could be accommodated in magazines, bandoliers, and the like, and fed into the breeches of firing mechanisms.

Only a single gun, in the sense of a traditional pre-Zero firearm, had survived the Hard Rain and found its way to Cleft. This was, of course, the revolver that Julia had removed from Pete Starling’s shoulder holster and secreted on her person until the moment when she had attempted to shoot Tekla with it. Camila had interceded, probably saving Tekla’s life, and suffered burns that had left her scarred and in pain for the remainder of her days. Later, the same weapon had fallen into the hands of Aïda. She had issued it to a member of her band who had fired the Last Bullet from the Last Gun to kill Steve Lake. The weapon was now in the collection of the historical museum on the Great Chain. Whether and how it was put on public display was a reliable barometer of the state of Red-Blue relations.

Since the metalworking technology needed to make new guns had also been destroyed, and since many generations had passed on Cleft before anyone had even conceived a need for gunlike objects, the entire armaments industry, when it had finally gotten rebooted, had done so from a clean slate. The results owed more to Tasers, several of which had made their way to Cleft, than to traditional firearms. The latter had been designed to project a dumb lump of metal at high speed and been optimized over time to deliver high rates of fire. But spraying dumb lumps of metal around the cramped interior of a space habitat was not a good fit for any use that could be conceived of by the engineers who, hundreds of years after the arrival on Cleft, began to think once again about how to make projectile weapons. During the intervening centuries, violence had generally been a matter of grappling, punching, and the use of hand weapons such as metal rods, with really dangerous stuff like knives and swords used only in a few cases by people who had gone well off the political or psychological rails. The first new projectile weapons were made specifically for use against those. The maximum range was perhaps ten meters, so the projectiles didn’t have to travel with high velocity. They had to be smart in the sense that if they missed the target — if they struck anything that was not a human being — they should become as nondestructive as possible. This generally meant that they would deploy what amounted to tiny drag chutes and slow themselves down as quickly as possible, while preparing to fragment against, as opposed to penetrating, whatever they hit. On the other hand, any projectile fortunate enough to reach its target should try to do something useful, which generally meant incapacitating, injuring, or killing it. Clearly, all of these decisions were well above the pay grade of dumb lumps of metal and so nats were used instead. These were not as dense as lead, so they had a low ballistic coefficient and could not travel very far. Again, however, in the context of a space habitat this was a good thing.

After a sort of dark age during which the Cleft colony had lacked the resources needed to advance the art of robotics, and contented themselves with fixing, and making copies of, the original models, new engineering resources had begun going into this branch of technology. The bolder programmers were daring to meddle with code files that had last been checked in by Eve Dinah. Mechanical engineers were figuring out how to reboot ancient CAD software and examine the digital blueprints created by Larz. Their initial efforts were fairly simple, such as making a nat that would automatically throw out a drag chute after it had traveled a certain distance without hitting anything. More effort went into the projectors than the projectiles. Police and military users tended to be Teklans, whose Anglisky contained more Russian loan words than that of other races, and borrowed many characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. “Katapult” was their preferred term for the device that threw the projectile nats. They shortened it to various affectionate terms such as “kat” and “katya.” The second half of the word, “pult,” seemed to have a connection to “pulya,” pronounced with a long U as in “pool,” which was the Russian word for “bullet.” After a brief, awkward phase of trying to combine the term “nat” with “pulya” in various ways, meaning something like “bullet-robot,” they had just settled for “pulya,” which was sufficiently precise in a universe that no longer included any actual old-school bullets. Other words from the antediluvian gun world made it through unchanged, such as “shoot” and “shot,” but officers giving the command to shoot tended now to say “pul,” recalling what skeet and trap shooters had once called out when they wanted a clay pigeon to be thrown.

Use of the term “pulya” without any modification tended to irritate knowledgeable interlocutors in exactly the same way as pre-Zero gun nuts had reacted to laypersons who used the word “bullet.” This reflected the fact that pulyas came in an even vaster range of sizes and types than old-school ammo. There were only so many things that could be done with a lump of lead. A far wider range of options lay open to the pulya engineer. An alternative term, “ambot,” was also used. This was all context dependent. Grunts, who tended to see these things as necessary burdens to be hauled around in bulk, loaded into kats, unjammed from firing mechanisms, etc., tended to use “pulya,” but once the projectile had actually been fired and begun to execute its program, it tended to be called an “ambot.” When speaking of bulk supplies, people would say “botmo” in the same way that “ammo” had been used on Old Earth.

The sort of person who needed to be shot at by the authorities because he or she was committing violence, or threatening to, with edged weapons, was unlikely to submit meekly to advances in the technologies used to enforce civil order. Directly they began to develop countermeasures, which, of course, then needed to be surmounted by the engineers in turn. If an ambot, for example, could be fooled into believing that it had missed its target or struck something that was not a human, it could be rendered nearly harmless. Camouflage changed its purpose from fooling the human eye to fooling the electronic brains of ambots. Armor was no longer made to stop extremely fast pieces of lead. Its purpose now was to protect the wearer from the invasive strivings of ambots. Warriors became living, moving fortresses under siege of multiple ambots that often used swarm tactics to find a way inside before their batteries ran down. The old tactical calculus of projectile warfare changed in other ways too. Katapults and botmo that had been captured by the enemy, or that had simply fallen to the floor and been picked up, could be rendered inert and useless by digital means. Some of them would try to find their way back to their masters, and so battle zones in which a lot of botmo had been expended tended to look as though they were infested by army ants as spent ambots attempted to swarm back toward the combatants who had fired them.