Blindsight

The “telematter” drive that gets our characters to the story is based on teleportation studies reported in Nature⁴¹, Science,^42,43 Physical Review Letters⁴⁴, and (more recently) everyone and their dog^{e.g., 45}. The idea of transmitting antimatter specs as a fuel template is, so far as I know, all mine. To derive plausible guesses for Theseus’s fuel mass, accelleration, and travel time I resorted to The Relativistic Rocket⁴⁶, maintained by the mathematical physicist John Baez at UC Riverside. Theseus’ use of magnetic fields as radiation shielding is based on research out of MIT⁴⁷. I parked the (solar powered) Icarus Array right next to the sun because the production of antimatter is likely to remain an extremely energy-expensive process for the near future^{48, 49}.

The undead state in which Theseus carries her crew is, of course, another iteration of the venerable suspended animation riff (although I’d like to think I’ve broken new ground by invoking vampire physiology as the mechanism). Two recent studies have put the prospect of induced hibernation closer to realization. Blackstone et al. have induced hibernation in mice by the astonishingly-simple expedient of exposing them to hydrogen sulfide⁵⁰; this gums up their cellular machinery enough to reduce metabolism by 90%. More dramatically (and invasively), researchers at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh claim⁵¹ to have resurrected a dog three hours after clinical death, via a technique in which the animal’s blood supply was replaced by an ice-cold saline solution⁵². Of these techniques, the first is probably closer to what I envisioned, although I’d finished the first draft before either headline broke. I considered rejigging my crypt scenes to include mention of hydrogen sulfide, but ultimately decided that fart jokes would have ruined the mood.

The Game Board

Blindsight describes Big Ben as an “Oasa Emitter". Officially there’s no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters^{53, 54} — dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common^55,56 — ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa’s emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist⁵⁷).

Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants^{58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64} and/or brown dwarves^{65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, , 73, 74, 75}, scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach’s ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick⁷⁶. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field⁷⁷.

Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 2000 Cr₁₀₅, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system⁷⁸.

Scrambler Anatomy and Physiology

Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an “alien” that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.

Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge — and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler’s distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction — the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk — takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but…