Peter Watts - Firefall

The “telematter” drive that gets our characters to the story is based on teleportation studies reported in Nature , [42] Riebe, M. et al. 2004. Deterministic quantum teleportation with atoms. Nature 429: 734-737. Science, [43] Furusawa, A. et al. 1998. Unconditional Quantum Teleportation. Science , 282(5389): 706-709. , [44] Carlton M. Caves, C.M. 1998. A Tale of Two Cities. Science , 282: 637-638. Physical Review Letters , [45] Braunstein, S.L., and Kimble, H.J. 1998. Teleportation of continuous quantum variables. Physical Review Letters 80: 869-872. and (more recently) everyone and their dog. [46] E.g. Quantum Teleportation: http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/ . The idea of transmitting antimatter specs as a fuel template is, so far as I know, all mine. To derive plausible guesses for Theseus ’s fuel mass, accelleration, and travel time I resorted to The Relativistic Rocket, [47] The Relativistic Rocket: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html . maintained by the mathematical physicist John Baez at UC Riverside. Theseus ’ use of magnetic fields as radiation shielding is based on research out of MIT. [48] Atkinson, N. 2004. Magnetic Bubble Could Protect Astronauts on Long Trips. Universe Today , http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/magnetic_bubble_protect.html . I parked the (solar powered) Icarus Array right next to the sun because the production of antimatter is likely to remain an extremely energy-expensive process for the near future. [49] Holzscheiter, M.H., et al. 1996. Production and trapping of antimatter for space propulsion applications. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics-1996-2786 ASME, SAE, and ASEE, Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, 32nd, Lake Buena Vista, FL, July 1-3. , [50] www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/Papers/NASA_anti.pdf .

The undead state in which Theseus carries her crew is, of course, another iteration of the venerable suspended animation riff (although I’d like to think I’ve broken new ground by invoking vampire physiology as the mechanism). Two recent studies have put the prospect of induced hibernation closer to realization. Blackstone et al. have induced hibernation in mice by the astonishingly-simple expedient of exposing them to hydrogen sulfide; [51] Blacstone, E., et al. 2005. H 2 S Induces a Suspended Animation–Like State in Mice. Science 308: 518. this gums up their cellular machinery enough to reduce metabolism by 90%. More dramatically (and invasively), researchers at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh claim [52] The data have not been published as of this writing. to have resurrected a dog three hours after clinical death, via a technique in which the animal’s blood supply was replaced by an ice-cold saline solution. [53] Bails, J. 2005. Pitt scientists resurrect hope of cheating death. Pittburgh Tribune-Review, June 29. Available online at http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/regional/s_348517.html . Of these techniques, the first is probably closer to what I envisioned, although I’d finished the first draft before either headline broke. I considered rejigging my crypt scenes to include mention of hydrogen sulfide, but ultimately decided that fart jokes would have ruined the mood.

Blindsight describes Big Ben as an “Oasa Emitter”. Officially there’s no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters [54] Oasa, Y. et al. 1999. A deep near-infrared survey of the chamaeleon i dark cloud core. Astrophysical Journal 526: 336-343. , [55] Normile, D. 2001. Cosmic misfits elude star-formation theories. Science 291: 1680. (dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common [56] Lucas, P.W., and P.F. Roche. 2000. A population of very young brown dwarfs and free-floating planets in Orion. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 314: 858-864. , [57] Najita, J.R., G.P. Tiede, and J.S. Carr. 2000. From stars to superplanets: The low-mass initial mass function in the young cluster IC 348. Astrophysical Journal 541(Oct. 1):977-1003. ) ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa’s emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist [58] Matthews, Jaymie. 2005. Personal communication. ).

Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants [59] Liu, W., and Schultz, D.R. 1999. Jovian x-ray aurora and energetic oxygen ion precipitation. Astrophysical Journal 526:538-543. , [60] Chen, P.V. 2001. Magnetic field on Jupiter. The Physics Factbook , http://hypertextbook.com/facts/ . , [61] Osorio, M.R.Z. et al. 2000. Discovery of Young, Isolated Planetary Mass Objects in the σ Orionis Star Cluster. Science 290: 103-106. , [62] Lemley, B. 2002. Nuclear Planet. Discover 23(8). , [63] NuclearPlanet.com: http://www.nuclearplanet.com/ . , [64] Dulk, G.A., et al. 1997. Search for Cyclotron-maser Radio Emission from Extrasolar Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28–August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts. , [65] Marley, M. et al. 1997. Model Visible and Near-infrared Spectra of Extrasolar Giant Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28–August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts. and/or brown dwarves [66] Boss, A. 2001. Formation of Planetary-Mass Objects by Protostellar Collapse and Fragmentation. Astrophys. J. 551: L167. , [67] Low, C., and D. Lynden-Bell. 1976. The minimum Jeans mass or when fragmentation must stop. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 176: 367. , [68] Jayawardhana, R. 2004. Unraveling Brown Dwarf Origins. Science 303: 322-323. , [69] Fegley, B., and K. Lodders. 1996. Atmospheric Chemistry of the Brown Dwarf Gliese 229B: Thermochemical Equilibrium Predictions. Astrophys. J. 472: L37. , [70] Lodders, K. 2004. Brown Dwarfs—Faint at Heart, Rich in Chemistry. Science 303: 323-324. , [71] Adam Burgasser. 2002. June 1 edition of the Astrophysics Journal Letters. , [72] Reid, I.N. 2002 Failed stars or overacheiving planets? Science 296: 2154-2155. , [73] Gizis, J.E. 2001. Brown dwarfs (enhanced review) Online article supplementing Science 294: 801. , [74] Clarke, S. 2003. Milky Way’s nearest neighbour revealed. NewScientist.com News Service, 04/11/03. , [75] Basri, G. 2000. Observations of brown dwarfs. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys 38:485–519. , [76] Tamura, M. et al. 1998. Isolated and Companion Young Brown Dwarfs in the Taurus and Chamaeleon Molecular Clouds. Science 282: 1095-1097. scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach ’s ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick. [77] Berger, E. 2001. Discovery of radio emission from the brown dwarf LP944-20. Nature 410: 338-340. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field. [78] Anonymous, 2000. A brown dwarf solar flare. Science@Nasa , http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast12jul_1m.htm .