Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Farewell, old friends,” Bruno murmured as they came to the end of it, as the last two robots swept into their bows. Muddy burst out crying again.

“It’s been a privilege, sir,” the house said.

“I thank you,” Muddy sobbed, “from the very bottom of my wounded heart.”

Then Bruno touched him on the shoulder and steered him toward the ship, and together they climbed through the little hatch. Inside was a miniature palace of diamonds and green velvet, of blue-and-white veined lapis and green-and-white veined jade. The two little chairs had become slick, stylish acceleration couches in black leather; the toilet had turned to gold.

“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed on seeing it. “Did I accuse you of shoddy design, Brother? I retract every word!”

“It’s just library patterns,” Muddy said, shrugging, his sobs trailing away into sniffles again. Then he straightened. “Oblivion! Aren’t we forgetting your pet?”

“My pet? My pet?” Bruno felt his eyes widen. “Ah, God! Hugo!”

He leaped through the hatch, catching his boot toe on it, and fell sprawling in the rotting grass, narrowly missing smashing his nose. He needn’t have bothered, though; the battered robot stood outside, looking as if it’d been just about to climb in.

“Mewl,” it said distinctly, looking down at Bruno in an oddly human—if faceless—way.

“Yes,” Bruno agreed, rising, brushing himself off, “mewl indeed. Climb aboard, you, and quickly. There’s much to do, and little time!”

Of the world’s destruction there Is little to say; grapples cleft the planet in twain, exposing its core of prismatic-white neubles, and the neubles were collapsed into proton-sized black holes, and the black holes were formed into collapsium, and the collapsium was squashed into a torus of vacuo-gel hypercollapsite and positioned atop the ertial shield.

The destruction of the sun was somewhat more delicate, somewhat more involved, but only slightly. Muddy, staring upward through the wellstone “window” of the bow, wept and moaned inconsolably throughout the process, until Bruno, who was none too happy about all this himself, finally snapped at him to shut up. Hugo mewled once and fell silent, and as the ertial shield whumped into place atop the spaceship’s impervium bow and the propulsion grapples locked onto their distant target, there was only the sound of the two men breathing: one raggedly, the other not.

The star field—and the debris field of their former home—-rippled only slightly; the ertial shield was transparent to visible light, transparent in fact to nearly every phenomenon the universe could throw at it. It existed primarily as an absence, a damping, a silence in the zero-point field’s infinite screeching.

“Engage the beams,” Bruno said, when all systems were ready.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Muddy acknowledged in sullen, childish tones. In place of a standard hypercomputer interface he’d designed a late renaissance control panel, with all manner of gilded switches and levers and dials, and with his hands he now manipulated these controls.

The transition from weightlessness to weight was immediate; the debris field dropped away against the unmoving stars, and Bruno felt his lungs compress, the air forced out of them by the weight of his own breastbone. The acceleration wasn’t enormous—the system was set for precisely 1.00000 gee— but it came on as a step function. Its time derivative, known to physicists as “jerk,” was nearly infinite, lurching them from zero to full throttle in a millionth of a millionth of a microsecond. Funny how, in their hurry, they hadn’t considered the effect of this on tender flesh and blood; it hurt. Not a stinging or a burning or a bruising kind of hurt, but a pressing , like having a soft, heavy couch dropped on you.

“Ah, my bones!” Muddy shrieked. “My ribs! I’ve broken my ribs!” And then he vomited over the side of his couch and shrieked again.

“Steady,” Bruno said, unfastening restraints and sitting up. The movement was unwise. The ertial shield swept away the zero-point field immediately ahead of them, leaving behind a medium one thousand times less energetic; in theory, plowing through this sparser field at one thousand times the acceleration should have been completely equivalent to 1.00000 gee, indistinguishable in every way from normal gravity or thrust. But a bow-heavy structure weighing trillions of tons, however cleverly disguised, poses some minor practical difficulties. What was really going on, in this air-filled space behind the hypercollapsite? Was it surprising that inner-ear fluids might misbehave?

While these thoughts raced through Bruno’s head, his body slid off the acceleration couch and onto the floor. He felt there was something strange in the way he fell, and stranger still in the way he landed, as if the fine hairs on his skin were solid rods growing out of a light, solid, cleverly articulated doll. He attempted to rise. The floor had a comforting traction, at least, but it seemed his mass—his weight —rose too quickly for the press of gravity. Something a little off, a little light, with the inertia?

His dizziness continued, along with an odd, pressing sensation in his chest. The heart? He imagined inertialess blood pumping through inertialess veins. Pressure and viscosity and muscular contraction weren’t functions of inertia; the heart would pump. The blood would flow. But strangely, yes.

Beside him, Hugo lay where they’d strapped it to the floor. It held a worn metal hand in front of its face and made small movements with it every few moments, seeming somehow fascinated with the results. Had Hugo discovered inertia, by virtue of its sudden reduction?

With great concentration, Bruno managed to regain his balance and rise slowly to his feet, standing unsteadily between Muddy’s couch and his own.

“My bones,” Muddy whined tearfully, “my organs. My eyes .”

He was rolling back and forth as much as his restraints would allow, as if in a kind of slow seizure, but Bruno immediately had the sense that the movement was voluntary, that Muddy wasn’t seriously hurt, that the tears were of misery rather than outright agony.

Bruno reached out with uncertain fingers to probe at Muddy’s chest. “Does this hurt? Here? Here?”

Muddy cried out each time, but the bones themselves felt perfectly intact. “Ow! Ow, sir, you grieve me!”

“I don’t think there’s a fracture.”

His groaning intensified. “No fracture? God, you’d think after years of torture a person would become inured to pain. The truth is otherwise! Opposite! Bruno, if you knew the indignities these bones had been’s-s-subjected to. Split with wedges? I only wish. It’s that legacy that haunts me now.”

Bruno frowned down at himself. “The fax should have healed any injuries. You should be every bit as fit as I am.”

“Should I?” Muddy’s face was miserable, ashamed. He tried to turn away. “I’ve been cunningly redesigned, sir, in ways the fax has little ability to detect and still less to repair. Primarily in the synaptic wiring, but he took some liberties with my’s-s-skeleton as well. To move is to suffer; to hold still is to suffer more.”

Bruno, who was getting tired of feeling aghast, merely sighed. “We’ll undesign you, then.”

“Easy to say. Someday, yes, no doubt we’ll overcome his cleverness. Meanwhile, I suppose I deserve these miseries.”

Here was a clumsy move, an attempt to make Bruno deny it. He declined again to take the bait, saying instead, “There are pressing concerns and limited resources, and anyway that little fax”—he pointed—“won’t pass a human body. So perhaps it is necessary for you to be patient until the situation has stabilized. I’m sorry for that, particularly since your suffering doesn’t appear to build character.”