Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [302]
The Rings of Jove: there was something remarkable enough in its implications, but it was nothing to the fact that I was walking around. There was no evidence that I was under acceleration, no sense of motion when the view outside the window reeled. That the vessel used rockets was proof enough that no form of gravity-control was involved: if you have gravity-control, you have a Space Drive into the bargain, and you certainly don’t fart around with rockets.
One horribly plausible explanation, as I sat there with my head in my hands (ha!), was that the real virtual reality here wasn’t the telepresence I’d experienced in the frame. That telepresence could be the real thing; the rooms, and the flesh, in which I found myself, the figment. My real body, now, could be the ship itself, and what I experienced ‘inside’ it a simulation, run on that ship’s computer.
There was also the possibility that it was the other way round – that my body and the room were real, and that what was outside was a simulation. (Or a real telepresence – I tried to remember if any of Jupiter’s moons had a similar mass to Earth. Or whether, perhaps, I was on a ship or space-station, spinning to give a one-gee weight…) Could it be that what I’d woken from was mere amnesia: that I hadn’t died in that Kazakh snow-drift but had recovered, and had worked for years on this evidently gigantic project?
Or, of course, I might not be in space at all! The whole set-up could just as well be some VR training rig on Earth! Surely, of all the possibilities, that was the one that Occam’s razor shaved the least. Perversely, it was the one I thought of last, perhaps because I didn’t dare to hope that it was correct.
Still, it brought me to my feet. I went to the table and looked at the computer: flat screen, flat pad, all standard.
All dead. Damn.
I stepped into the frame again. Once more, with my face pressed against the metal net, my viewpoint became one with that of the machine. I moved the arms of the frame, but the arms of the ship didn’t move with them. I guessed that I only had control of them in certain circumstances. So I hung there for a while, and took in the scene.
Jupiter loomed before me. I was moving rapidly towards the swarm of black dots around the black structure. With another rocket burn, this time from the front and again without any sense of a change in velocity, I slowed and drifted into the swarm. As I passed other darting machines I was able to examine their shape and infer that of my own:
Cylindrical, they had arms at mid-section which appeared capable of articulating and extending in any direction; ‘hands’ like bushes, fingers repeatedly dividing and sub-dividing; the trunk covered with lenses, nozzles, aerials and hatches; four shorter, sturdier limbs for gripping and grappling; all (except the lenses) made from a matt black substance that didn’t look metallic, and which was usually stained and scratched. The machines oriented themselves with the jets (robots with attitude control, I thought with an inward smile) and were working in eerie, silent harmony on what looked, to me at that time, the biggest space-station ever built. If the robots were of approximately human size, then the structure must be tens of kilometres across.
I remembered early experiments with spiders in space, spiders on drugs. What I saw could be imagined as the work of a million free-falling, hallucinating spiders. Around it the black robots moved in their Newtonian ballet, and within its strands other things moved with an easier grace. Their numerous and multi-coloured forms resembled computer renderings of chaos equations, mathematical monsters whose outer fractal surfaces whipped and flickered like the