Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

He could make out the insides of the Sabadell-Andorra , yes, her hull all but transparent in this foggy light. Inside that space were the many human bodies he and Muddy had collected, but they were bouncing around off every surface, like ping-pong balls. Sometimes they spun, sometimes not. Sometimes they’d stop suddenly, and then be knocked into motion again by the collision of someone else. All their transitions were instantaneous, rigid. Bruno himself was not bouncing, since he was strapped into his ghostly-clear couch. Another form—Deliah, in her folding chair?—was also motionless, though the body twitched in a quick, unpleasant, insectile way.

The screams continued.

“ER, TRY TO REMAIN CALM,” he rumbled at them. “SEE IF YOU CAN GRAB ONTO SOMETHING.”

Almost immediately, one of the bodies stopped bouncing. Bruno peered at it, trying to make out details. A person, desperately gripping Muddy’s control panel with arms and knees?

“it works,” a faint, whispery voice, barely audible sounded, “you can stop yourself you can catch yourself”

Another body froze in place against the hatchway. Soon someone else was clinging to that . Then a pair of bodies were bouncing together, clinging to each other but not to anything else.

Suddenly there were voices rather than screams, “where are we hey that’s my hair i’ve got you don’t let go we are inside the ring collapsiter i thought we were dead for sure…”

“SHIP?” Bruno tried.

“… because i can’t reach it that’s my eye you will have to climb over…”

“SHIP!”

“Y-r-mnk-str-hhhhhhk”

“SABADELL-ANDORRA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

“C… d not pro… d”

“SHIFT YOUR AUDIO FREQUENCIES. TRANSMIT LOWER. LISTEN HIGHER. THE SPEED OF SOUND HAS CHANGED.”

“C… nsating. This is a test signal. Can you hear me, sir?” The voice was tinny but clear.

“YES! CAN YOU REBROADCAST OUR VOICES IN A FREQUENCY-SHIFTED DOMAIN?”

Now in a stronger voice: “Th . .‘t should be possible in a moment, sir. I’m experiencing an enormous number of intermittent computational malfunctions, but I have established sufficient redundancy to compensate. Shift and rebroadcast is enabled.”

Bruno cleared his throat, then tried to speak normally. “Hello?” His voice, despite an echoey, underwater quality, sounded much better. And with much less effort, too.

“Hello!” four or five other voices called back.

Then a new burst of chatter broke out.

“I can hearl”

“… got my voice back.”

“I feel really sick.”

“Help! I don’t like this!”

“Excuse me, Madam, I need you to move a little to the left. Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

Outside the weirdly translucent hull, Bruno could just barely make out stippled rows and columns of pinpoint brightness in the fog: the collapsium lattice that surrounded them. Curiously, it moved only slightly, vibrating a few centimeters back and forth in irregular bursts. Was the ship stuck against it somehow? It was not easy to see, to perceive any details at all, but there did seem to be some sort of kink in the tunnel ahead of them.

“What do we do now?” someone wanted to know.

An excellent question! This was no comfortable place—it was weightlessness and ertial travel, fever and sensory deprivation, hallucination and drowning all rolled into one. Bruno had felt more at ease on rickety sailboats, riding the stormy seas of Tonga! But how to escape? And where to go?

“Sykes may believe we’re dead,” Cheng Shiao’s voice said tightly, through tinkling bells and underwatery echoes. “That’s something.”

Vivian Rajmon’s voice replied. “I half believe it myself, Cheng. Is that your hand? It feels like wood!”

Bruno peered and squinted, trying to perceive the two, to tell them apart from the others. Were there visual cues when a person spoke? Did translucent angel-amoebas have a discernible body language? He picked out two figures huddled together by the fireplace and decided that was probably who they were.

Annoyingly, one figure still bounced around the hull’s interior. The body was difficult to focus on, almost too quick to see at all.

“Declarant,” another male voice said, “I don’t feel too well right now.”

“I’m sure none of us do,” Bruno agreed. “Who is that? Wenders Rodenbeck?”

“The man himself,” Rodenbeck’s voice agreed.

“Is that you bouncing around?”

“That’s right. My hands’ve gone numb; I can’t seem to make the fingers work. I feel sort of poisoned , if that makes sense to you.”

Bruno’s face threw itself into an inertialess frown. “Seriously ill, hmm?”

“Seriously,” Rodenbeck agreed, in steady but frightened tones. “Whatever’s… happening to us in here, I think it must be very unhealthy. Getting out of this seems like a pretty necessary thing, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Bruno, fearing Rodenbeck had suffered some sort of inertialess whiplash injury to his neck, suppressed the urge to nod. “I quite agree. Try not to move, sir. Your symptoms are troubling, and without knowing their cause, there’s no telling whether you could exacerbate them, or indeed, whether the rest of us could be similarly affected. But haste will likely make things worse. Can you remain calm for a few minutes?”

“De Towaji is right,” Shiao said. “We don’t even know what sort of weapon was used against us back there. Explosive projectiles of some sort?”

“There were no projectiles,” Bruno said. “Just bursts of energy.”

“Energy doesn’t just appear ,” Deliah objected.

“Indeed. It’s puzzling. Perhaps Marlon was locally inverting the photon states of the zero-point field? That would create energetic bursts, but they’d be short-lived, and since this would also carve equivalent holes in the vacuum, which the energy would immediately rush back in to fill, the net release would still be zero. I suppose that is consistent with what we’ve observed.”

Then came Muddy’s voice, only slightly whiny. “Pulsed gravity lasers, if they were crossed , should create brief p-peaks of intense gravitation. Potentially, eight crossed beams could create the equivalent of a collapsium lattice, for picosecond intervals.”

“Ah. Clever thought.”

Shiao made an optimistic grunt. “It’s not dangerous, then? It’s a trick, an illusion?”

“Oh,” Bruno said, “I don’t know about that. The net energy of a knife is also zero. Better a knife than a bomb, I’ll wager, but finding ourselves in the middle of such an inversion would almost certainly be harmful.”

“Fatal?”

Bruno’s inertialess shrug nearly dislocated both shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Captain. I’m speculating enough as it is. It would get inside our superreflectors, I’m sure. It would appear inside, without having to penetrate. But he would have to score the hit on us, first, and that appears difficult. For whatever reason, the timing and position of the flashes don’t appear to be precisely controllable.”

Shiao persisted. “Why would he use such an ineffective weapon? Because this ship is too nimble? Too difficult to target with a nasen beam?”

“He does seem to have a lot of devices at his disposal,” Muddy agreed. “At least one nasen projector, probably eight or more gravity lasers, and oblivion knows how many’s-s-standard EM grapples, to pull the Iscog and the Ring Collapsiter apart as he has. The energy he’s expended in the past five minutes would fill a battery twice as large as this ship. How much has he expended in the past week” ? The past three weeks?”