A Million Castaways

By Barry Pomeroy

Our world is dying, people are starving and fighting wars over the few remaining resources. World Builder Corporation says it has developed the technology to build new worlds and is recruiting thousands of volunteers to train on its state-of-the-art space station.
Vincent Cosa accepts that challenge. Unable to find work, despised by his ex-wife, and seeking a better life, Vince volunteers to be a World Builder recruit. Once he arrives at the space station and is given a number, however, he realizes that dozens of recruits are sent to the asteroid belt every day and are never heard from again.
Back on Earth, Vince's sister wants to know what happened to Vince and the other recruits who have disappeared into space. When she is not able to get answers from the Corporation, she teams up with an outlaw hacker and an underground group of astronomers from SETI, and begins to discover that something is very wrong on the World Builder space station. Even as the struggles with financial collapse, her search goes far beyond a family affair.
Will what is happening in the asteroid belt give hope to humanity, or destroy it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Dec 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310491238

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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A Million Castaways

by

Barry Pomeroy

© 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

A Million Castaways

Our world is dying, people are starving and fighting wars over the few remaining resources. World Builder Corporation says it has developed the technology to build new worlds and is recruiting thousands of volunteers to train on its state-of-the-art space station.

Vincent Cosa accepts that challenge. Unable to find work, despised by his ex-wife, and seeking a better life, Vince volunteers to be a World Builder recruit. Once he arrives at the space station and is given a number, however, he realizes that dozens of recruits are sent to the asteroid belt every day and are never heard from again.

Back on Earth, Vince's sister wants to know what happened to Vince and the other recruits who have disappeared into space. When she is not able to get answers from the Corporation, she teams up with an outlaw hacker and an underground group of astronomers from SETI, and begins to discover that something is very wrong on the World Builder space station. Even as the struggles with financial collapse, her search goes far beyond a family affair.

Will what is happening in the asteroid belt give hope to humanity, or destroy it?

Chapter One

They weren’t nano-replicators in the strictest sense of the word. Vince knew that. Most of what was said about them back at Central had been hype, as he’d guessed when he’d signed up for the potentially one way trip to the freezer. Actually, the tiny machines labouring away at the regolith below him were dumb von Neumann machines, just barely bright enough to process ore, most of them, although a few could self-assemble.

Another failed promise of the post-oil age had been artificial intelligence. The silicon ceiling meant that the largest neural net ever built could barely run a chess game. Without artificial consciousness, with its promised capacity of hundreds of decisions working out of the fuzzy logic necessary for the natural world, the von Neumanns had to be run by a human. That’s why Vince was on a spinning ball two hundred million kilometres from Earth. Although that didn’t explain why Vince had signed up to be put into a tin can and shot away from everything he knew.

The project was run by a corporation called World Builder. Its name went a long way toward explaining why someone like Vince, a man of average intelligence and even more modest education, could be selected to monitor the most advanced machines in the solar system. World Builder’s mandate was to convert the less useful rocks of the solar system first to ore, and then liveable habitats. Earth was increasingly resource-poor, so this had to be done on the cheap. Thus, World Builder’s clever spin had convinced expendable people to be the guiding consciousness to hundreds, then thousands, then millions of dumb machines.

More excited by the prospect of building a planetoid than he was the inevitable lawsuit from his disgruntled ex-wife, and knowing Earth had increasingly little to offer him, Vince had volunteered. The payoff was considerable, for anyone he left on Earth—and Vince made sure his sister was the sole beneficiary of the million credits he’d left behind. Vince hadn’t made much of himself on Earth, and even as he was fitted with the electrodes and more invasive tubes that would enable the half-sleeping drug-induced state he’d need to be in to survive the two year trip sane, Vince had no regrets.

His childhood had coincided with the first real resource crash, and he’d grown up watching one nation after another, and then corporations, fight for the remaining table scraps of the oil age. By the time Vince was eleven, water was in short supply over Amergo, and he had to leave the sunny southern desert that used to be the Kansas cornfields and migrate with millions of others to the frozen wastelands of the state of Saskatchewan. There life held tenaciously to the broad carpet of mono-crops and water was diverted from wild areas to the fields. His father told him that Saskatchewan was humanity’s last stand, and ignoring his mother’s sighs and outright disagreement, Vince and his sister Miriam had grown up with their father’s vision in their heads. Amergo was one of the richest nations outside of the Sino Empire, and nearly had the highest standard of living, but many times on the way to school Vince had to step around the shrivelled limbs of a homeless person maintenance hadn’t had time to clean up.

His marks in school had not been stellar, and when the factory beckoned, Vince was enticed. He left school for the factory floor, and finally worked his way up to labour beside his machinist father. They fine-tuned the cutters and presses. When a particularly accurate hand was called for, Vince would watch his father delicately manipulate a lathe bigger than a truck, whose chuck held a two-ton piece of raw steel. In twelve hours, after brief shutdowns for lunch and breaks, his father would have produced the spun bands for rocket motors, or the casing for Stirling heat engines that were currently all the rage in the solar fields that used to grow grain.

At that time, Vince’s only aspiration was to be as good a machinist as his father. When the technicians came in and installed computer-assisted, and then controlled, processes, Vince was leery. His feelings turned out to be justified, for the lay-offs began almost immediately. His father took the early retirement package and lay on the couch, sinking further and further into the cushions. Vince learned to operate the computers that had thrown his father, and increasingly many of his friends, out of a job, but he had done so grudgingly.

The computer controlled factories were Amergo’s last gasp, the dying attempt of a former empire to compete with the Sinos, who had more of everything and whose toiling millions could live on nothing and work for less. The flood of goods that had once been the birthright of every Amergo citizen had long since ceased to flow from the Sinos, and international shipping had been pinched to a tiny trickle. Domestic factories turned out essential goods and every factory that was lost meant a tightening of the industrial belt, which was already cutting into the gut of the once bloated nation.

That history made Vince’s situation all the more ironic. Nanos were chewing through the housing of his ship, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Chapter Two

Once he’d signed up, Vince had been shot into orbit on the ageing shuttle, then transferred to World Builder’s space station, which was a huge doughnut made originally from expended shuttle tanks and then expanded with defunct shuttles which had failed in service. Other pieces of space junk, such as satellites and booster rockets for inter-solar probes, had been broken down and reformed to make bulkheads and add-on chambers. It was a historical miscellany of humanity’s attempt to explore space, and pathetically, until this point, it represented the best that humans could do.

Once aboard, Vince had gone to a port to examine the patented recruit ships, which looked more like tin cans on a trash heap than high tech machines. Vince had observed them dubiously out of the tiny port, and then turned back to the hype.

You are the brave pioneers of a new world—

Translation—we are going to die out there.

Vince was already regretting sitting beside Russ, who thrived on an extreme cynicism. What Russ said was probably true, but Vince only wanted to think of the possibilities, drifting in frozen space as they were, and he was fearful enough.

By dint—

Dent

—of your efforts, humans have settled the moon and are mining Titan.

Research lab rats living in tunnels scarcely count as a colony. Russ’ long teeth glowed in the gloom of the darkened room. And Titan does something to you. Your hair falls out and you get bumps all over. Russ’ whisper was turning into a mumble.

In twenty years, World Builder has promised a hungry Earth—

That they’ll stay hungry, Russ was getting louder.

—habitats fit for kings and food for all. World Builder has made this commitment and plans to fulfil it.

Vince glanced over, since Russ was momentarily quiet. In the dark it was hard to see what Russ was fiddling with at his belt.

With your help, by dint of your efforts, the cold and dark of dead space will become heat and light and life.

When Russ stood, Vince involuntarily moved away from him. This is bullshit, Russ was almost screaming. We’re going to die out there. They’re going to pack us into cans with nano can openers and shoot us to our deaths. We have to—

Like everyone else, Vince sat as still as possible while Russ was hauled away by the security guards who hadn’t been there moments before. The lecture continued with a palpable sigh of relief, but like others around him, Vince wondered what was going to happen to Russ. The compensation for the family had already been paid, and likely spent, and after that display, World Builder would not trust Russ with a cookie cutter. When they’d left Earth, it was made clear—there was no going back.

The incident in the training session must not be repeated. Armoust had made his career off the backs of many subordinates, and his commands were not to be taken lightly. World Builder cannot afford to lose an entire squad. We are running on a shoestring here.

Malcolm glanced around Armoust’s office involuntarily, taking in the lush tapestries and the real teak desk shipped into orbit at god knows what expense. When his glance came back to Armoust, he suddenly worried that Armoust might, as some believed, be able to tell what he was thinking.

What have you done with the defective operator?

Disposed of, sir.

Harvested?

For harvest.

Good. Now make sure of our trajectories. We can’t afford any losses once we shoot them out. The fifty percent failure in the last quarter can’t simply be hidden behind statistics this time. People are starting to wonder where the volunteers end up. Every lost orbit is potentially a loss of return, remember that.

Malcolm had been on shift two years earlier when one of the first shoots had brought back a shrivelled carcass. He shuddered.

Also, collect some statements from the squad. Have them record letters to their loved ones, or their memoirs.

Sir? Malcolm was startled out of his remembrance.

We might be able to use the information later.

Malcolm knew his boss’ mind well enough to guess what use the memoirs of the unlucky souls might be put to, but he kept it to himself.

You shouldn't go, Vince, Miriam had been plaintive. I’m going to lose you. The boys will lose you. It’s suicide.

It’s just a mission, Vince had repeated the World Builder spin woodenly, sensing how unequal its lies were to Miriam’s fears. Five years at the outside, then I should have a propulsion system built and start bringing the asteroid back in.

Five years is a long time, Vince. A lot can happen in five years.

I want you to get out of the factory. Look at your hands. You’re looking old, Miriam. And I need to get away from Ann too. You know what she's like. The money will help—

Uncle Vince. Their conversation had turned with the arrival of the boys, and Vince was busy looking through homework and giving encouragement to his nephews, who he hoped would go further than him educationally if less in kilometres.

Chapter Three

The two weeks intensive training left Vince too tired even to complain. He was made to feel how inadequately he controlled the microscopic machines under his command and he soon forgot about Russ. He was run through simulations all day for the first week, and although his responses were getting faster and more accurate, he felt he was falling behind. He spurred himself to greater effort, sensing that failure on the station resulted in more than demotion.

Like many around him, he began to dream about being in space, although he didn’t have the energy to discuss it. While drifting to sleep, Vince would picture himself sitting in the harness of electrodes that connected him to the nanos. Moving his hands like a god, he called them to his whim. They built ornate sculptures to decorate his roomy, glass-walled buildings, and even while he stood in the middle of his town square, Vince saw that what he had done was good.

The second week of training was spent shipping out to a tiny module a kilometre from central. It contained dormant nanos for Vince to test his skills on. It was quarantined for a reason, he’d been told. A few operator mistakes can compound, the technician had grinned at Vince’s expression. And before you know it, you’ve got a nano chewing through your leg and headed for your brain. Ah, just kidding, buddy, he said when he saw the look on Vince’s face, but Vince had heard the stories. Tethering a research module a kilometre away was a waste of fuel in transport unless you had a good reason, and Vince had seen, as their pod had pulled them over the tether line, the packages of explosives that would cut the module loose if an alarm was pulled. World Builder wasn't worried about a few workers like Vince. They were more concerned the nanos might get out of control, and start chewing their way back to the station, eating the line like liquorice before settling into the main course.

Vince had been fairly successful at controlling the nanos in the sterile setting of the module. He attributed it to his slight programming background, having been the first in grade five to send his visual basic ball bouncing across the screen. Also, fear was his impetus. Perhaps his response was predictable, but Vince was terrified at his first sight of the nanos through the scope. They were quiescent and voracious killers, merely needing the slightest of programming nudges to send them ravening into matter.

By the end of the week, Vince had advanced enough to come to the attention of Malcolm, section chief. That was meant to be an honour. Dressed in his uniform, which was little more than clean coveralls, Vince stood before his boss, nodding at the appropriate moments and grinning at what he guessed were jokes. It reminded Vince of meeting Aboriginal people in northern Amergo once his family had moved. Vince had known that people overseas spoke differently, and in school they’d studied Spanish, but to hear the complexities of sound and know that he would never understand, made Vince wonder how such people lived. How had they survived when everyone else had been made into corporate drones?

Once Malcolm was done congratulating the grinning fool who was doing so well on his assigned work, he retired with a headache. Another thirty percent of operators had gone missing, and the guidance system that was supposed to more accurately locate their targets had gone offline. Malcolm could sense them drifting out there, some hundreds of men and women, looking at the blank screens in their drug induced stupor and wondering where central command had gone.

If only the systems would stay up