notes-fun-bitsOfLiteratureList

(sent to a friend)

hey i was putting away some books and decided to type in and send you the best part of Vinge's book "Marooned in Realtime" since you probably aren't going to read the book.

This is an excerpt about a cop (Wil) interviewing the last person (Tunc) to get marooned into the future (using those spheres of frozen time (bobbles)) before the end of most of humanity (they aren't sure if what happened was a singularity or an alien attack). Tunc was marooned 10 years after the previous person, so of course his technology was way ahead of everyone else's. He was marooned in an industrial accident; his spaceship automatically bobbled in order to save his life during an explosion, and he woke up 64000 years later.

Tunc has previously been mentioned as the most well-adjusted of the "high-techs", that is, those people who left shortly before the end and took a lot of technology with them (Tunc took the half of a one-person spaceship, about the size of a car, i guess, that wasn't vaporized, and his personal computer headband, which provided enough processing power that the rest of the high-techs traded him lots of other stuff for computing time), and the only high-tech who is friendly/socially fits in with the low-techs (there are about 12 high-techs and thousands of low-techs in marooned society). All of the other high-techs are wackos, or at least very eccentric, and don't feel comfortable hanging out with low-techs (or anyone, really). This may be partially because Tunc's the only high-tech who was forcibly marooned; all of the others chose to leave their society and travel hundreds or thousands of years into the future with no hope of return, for various eccentric reasons.

So basically Tunc is a model citizen. He's one of the most powerful, smart, socially well-adjusted human around, although he keeps a low profile and doesn't hold a position of power presumably because he doesn't care about such things. Wil is impressed by him.

Tunc: "We were running a matter/antimatter distillery...My partners and I specialized in close solar work, less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern hemisphere. When I ... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to damage an unprotected solar system."

Wil (a low-tech detective who is interviewing everyone): "Yelen's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of Yelen's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible without a headband [Yelen is the high-tech who is employing Wil as a detective; since she's a high-tech, she uses a headband].

"True!" Tunc's face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but they couldn't buy the neccessary options. Then we came along with a much bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a small Tipler cyclinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and have tidal strains above 1E13 g's per meter - but with bobbles it might be usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and siphon back the power to widen it." Tunc paused, some of the enthusiasm gone. "That was the plan, anyway. In fact, the distillery was almost too much for us. We were on site for days at a time. It gets on your nerves after awhile, knowing that beyond all the shielding, the sun is stretched from horizon to horizon. But we had to stay; we couldn't tolerate transmission delays. It took all of us linked to our mainframe to keep the brew stable. We had stability, but we weren't shipping quite everything out. Something near a tonne per second began accumulating over the south pole. We needed a quick fix or we'd lose performance bonuses. I took the repair boat across to work on it. The problem was just ten thousand kilometers from our station - a thirty-millisecond time lag. Intellect nets run fine with that much lag, but this was process control; we were taking a chance. We'd accumulated a two-hundred-thousand tonne backlog by then. It was all in flicker storage - a slowly exploding bomb. I had to repackage it and boost it out." Tunc shrugged. "That's the last I remember. Somehow, we lost control; part of that backlog recombined. My boat bobbled up. Now, I was on the sun side of the brew. The blast rammed me straight into Sol. There was no way my partners could save me. Bobbled into the sun. It was almost high-tech slang for certain death. "How could you ever escape?" [Tunc] Blumenthal smiled. "You haven't read about that? There is no way in heaven I could have [without help]. On the sun, the only way you can survive is to stay in statis. My initial bobbling was only for a few seconds. When it lapsed, the fail-safe did a quick lookabout, saw where we were heading, and rebobbled -- sixty-four thousand years. That was "effective infinity" to its pinhead program. .... [description of how another high-tech helped him escape by waiting a few tens of thousands of years until the Tunc's bobble happened to temporarily bounce out of the sun] .... .... other stuff .... "What was needed was greater than human intelligence. Between our processors and ourselves, my era was achieving that. My own company was small; there were only eight of us. We were backward, rural; the rest of humanity was hundreds of light-seconds away. The larger spacing firms were better off. Their computers were correspondingly bigger, and they had thousands of people linked. I had friends at Charon Corp and Stellation Inc. They thought we were crazy to stay so isolated. And when we visited their habitats, when the comm lag got to less than a second, I could see what they meant. There was power and knowledge and joy in those companies ... And they could plan circles around us. Our only advantage was mobility. Yet even these corporations were fragments, a few thousand people here and there. By the beginning of the twenty-third centiry, there were three billion people in the Earth/Luna volume. Three billion people and corresponding processing power - all less than three light-seconds apart. I ... it was strange, talking to them. We attending a marketing conference at Luna in 2209. Even linked, we never did understand what was going on." He was quiet for a long moment. .... "In 2207, we were the hottest project at Stellation Inc. They put everything they had into renting those easements around the sun. But after 2209, the edge was gone from their excitement. At the marketing conference at Luna, it almost seemed Stellation's backers were trying to sell our project as a frivolity." .... Tunc stopped, smiled. "So you have my thumbnail sketch of Great Events. You can get it all, clearer said with more detail, from Yelen's databases." He cocked his head to one side. "Do you like listening to others so much, Wil Brierson, that you visit me first?" Wil grinned back. "I wanted to hear you firsthand." ... "I'm one of the earlier low-techs, Tunc. I've never experienced direct connect - much less the mind links you talk about. But I know how much it hurts a high-tech to go without a headband." All through Marta's diary, that was a source of pain. "If I understand what you say about your time, you've lost much more. How can you be so cool?" The faintest shadow crossed Tunc's face. "It's not a mystery, really. I was nineteen when I left civilization. I've lived fifty years since. I don't remember much of the time right after my rescue. Yelen says I was in a coma for months. They couldn't find anything wrong with my body, just no one was home. I told you my little company was backwards, rural. That's only by comparison with our betters. There were eight of us, four women, four men. Maybe I should call it a group marriage because it was that, too. But it was more. We spent every spare gAu on our processor system and the interfaces. When we were linked up, we were something ... wonderful. But now all that's memories of memories - no more meaningful to me than to you." His voice was soft. "You know, we had a mascot: a poor, sweet girl, close to anencephalic. Even with prosthesis she was scarcely brighter than you or I. Most of the time she was happy." The expression on his face was wistful, puzzled. "And most of the time, I am happy, too."