Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The sections of Sphere shell material started to go again, but this time in a different pattern. This time, instead of building great arcs up toward the poles, the shell sections were added evenly all around the edge of the equatorial ring, adding equally to its northern and southern edges, working to make sure the whole system stayed in trim and balance. Sianna blinked and rubbed her eyes. There was something quite dizzying about the way Wally was running things.

The simulation seemed so intensely real when it was running at a steady clip and seen from one viewpoint. The degree of detail, the sharpness, the clarity of the images all gave the simulation a tremendous degree of verisimilitude. It was easy to imagine a real Dyson Sphere abuilding out there, and that she, Sianna, was watching it from the observation port of a nearby spacecraft. It took an act of will to remember that the images she saw were wholly imaginary. It was all brighter, more solid, more logical, more authentic than reality ever was.

But then Wally would slow time, speed it up, freeze it, run it backwards, pan and shift and zoom and flip the viewing angles, project this diagnostic screen or that status display over part of the sim, and the whole thing would be shown up for the dream, the hallucination it was.

God help them all if it was real, if this was what was happening to the Solar System in real life, instead of in a simulator nightmare.

Sianna took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand. She had already missed some key details. Did that mean her central idea was wrong as well? One way to find out. Watch the sim and see what happens.

Once Wally had the assembly-pattern problem worked out, things proceeded smoothly for a while, the Sphere growing steadily from the equator toward the two poles.

Quite abruptly, two fiery-bright points of light appeared in the outer edge of the system, spaced well away from each other. “Alpha Centauri A and B,” Wally said. “The first Captive Suns for the new system. Going to be tough to stabilize them this early on. Take some doing.” Sianna glanced at the display that showed elapsed time for the simulation. She was startled to see that more than a hundred years had already gone by since the initial Charonian attack, five years in her own past. She was seeing a century into a future that might have been.

But then something started to go wrong. The Moon, the last natural object of any size in the simulated Solar System, started to wobble in its orbit. “Hold it a second,” Wally said. “The Moon’s orbit is going unstable. Gravity from the Captive Suns is throwing it off.”

Another knot tied itself in Sianna’s stomach. She hadn’t foreseen this, either. It might be enough to blow off her whole theory, but if it did ruin things, then her theory was too flimsy for the real world anyway. She was tempted to nudge Wally toward her idea, but no. She was trying to get him to think like a Charonian. If anything, she should encourage him away from her idea. “So who cares about the Moon’s orbit, or the Moon, for that matter?” she asked in a level voice. “Why not just get rid of it altogether?”

“No, no I can’t,” Wally said. “Hold it a second.” His hands flew over the controls. “Stabilize it,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe a six-sided rosette pattern. That give us a dynamic load balance? Yeah, that ought to do it.” Five Ring-and-Hole sets moved out from the various construction sites and positioned themselves at equidistant points along the Moon’s orbit, so that the five anchor rings and the Moon were sixty degrees apart from each other in orbit.

“That seems like a lot of trouble just to hold the Moon in place,” Sianna said again, quite perversely pushing in the direction opposite to the one she wanted Wally to go. “Why not just get rid of it?” Sianna asked.

“Can’t,” Wally said. “It is a lot of trouble, I agree, but I’m stuck with the Moon. Remember the Lunar Wheel, inside the Moon, started this whole thing off by grabbing the Earth. The Wheel was the central conduit for power for the first twenty years or so, receiving gravity energy transmitted through the wormhole link by our Sphere. Once the Solar System started being a net gravitic energy producer, most of that power still had to move through the Lunar Wheel. In fact, the Lunar Wheel’s power transmission capacity had to go way up—and the Wheel had to handle a lot of new processing power.”

Wally pulled up a large image of the Moon, guiding the picture through the air until it hung a few feet in front of his head. “Here’s a cutaway,” Wally said, and a quarter-section slice of the Moon vanished, revealing the interior. Instead of just the Lunar Wheel wrapping once around the Moon’s core, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ring-shaped objects wrapped around the world. “This is all guesswork, of course,” Wally said. “I don’t know how they would add capacity, or what it would look like, but I do know the Wheel would have to add capacity as the building project went along. The sim was programmed to add it as needed. And this doesn’t even show the processing systems, the artificial intelligence centers that are managing construction and keeping the system stable.

“So yeah, it would be logical to cut the Moon out of the loop at this point. The Sphere is big enough to handle all the power control, but there are so many power and logic and comm interconnects through there that removing them all would be like the Sphere performing brain surgery on itself. The connections and control links to all the operations in the system are so complex, so keyed to synchronizations with the Moon’s orbit, that I wouldn’t even want to adjust the Moon’s orbit, because of all the other things you’d have to adjust as a result.

“See, at this point, the Moon is not just the only survivor of the Solar System’s worlds, it’s pretty much the de facto command center for the whole—” Wally stopped his work and looked up sharply as the light came on in his head. “ Command center ,” he whispered to himself.

He blanked the simulation, saved it back to the central data library, and brought up the simulation of the Multisystem that he had showed to Sianna in the long-ago morning of this endless day.

That had just been today? A wave of exhaustion swept over Sianna. How long ago had that morning been? Was it still the same day? What time was it now? Sianna knew she could find out the current, correct time, down to the nanosecond if she liked, by checking with any of a dozen instruments, starting with the clock on Wally’s control panel. But she did not want to look. She felt as if she were outside of time itself, and that being out of time was part of how she was getting the answer. Somehow the moment, the magic, the way things were falling into place would end if she knew what time it was in the outside world. And now the answers were so close.

Wally had the sim of the real-life Multisystem up and running now. He brought up a close-in image of the Sphere, of the huge, brooding globe—and the tiny, barely visible dot that orbited so close to it.

Sianna stared at it, knowing that Wally was seeing what she did, was understanding what the simulated destruction of the Solar System had told them. There it was. The only planet-sized body to orbit the Sphere directly. The lone, lifeless, uninhabitable world in a Multisystem built to store and preserve living worlds.

Charon Central, the control station for the whole system, a system built by a species that had remade itself again and again over the eons. But the Charonians had remade themselves not through logic, but through history, through growth and death and evolution and residual effects, by improvising and working with what they had, by using one problem to solve another.