This early in the morning, the tunnels to Shepardsport’s solar storm shelters were quiet. Later in the day, cleaning robots would come through to sweep and generally make sure the tunnels were always ready to be used at a moment’s notice. But right now they were a perfect place for Justin Forsythe to run.
And a perfect place to relax his barriers and open his mind to his psi talent. Down here, there wasn’t the continual din of other minds to make it overwhelming, even with his Institute training.
Normally the geneset of Ed White wasn’t used for genetic experiments. However, a clerical error — a simple reversal of two digits in a catalog number that tracked embryos — he had received a gene graft intended to give him precognition.
Or at least that was the plan. The people at Appleton might understand genetics, but they didn’t understand quantum mechanics. True classical precognition — the ability to see what would happen in the future — would require superdeterminism. And the Chang-Mendolssen experiments had pretty well discredited superdeterminism as a plausible subset of quantum theory.
Instead, Juss got a weird sort of precognition in which he saw a multitude of possible futures fanning out before him. As events foreclosed various possible futures, they fell away to become alternate worlds.
What worried him right now was just how dark those futures were becoming. Fewer and fewer of them held much in the way of hope.
Everything was going to depend on whether the diablovirus could be kept away from the Moon. The Martian settlements were safe, thanks to the long travel times between Mars and the Earth-Moon system — but that distance also meant they could offer little help in the subsequent rebuilding. Only the lunar settlements were just isolated enough that their populations could be protected from infection, but could also offer material aid in any meaningful quantity.
But even a little slip-up would be enough to introduce the virus. They’d already had one close call, and as a result the Japanese lunar ferry Sakura was unavailable for the three weeks’ quarantine it would require to ensure not only that none of the Indian astronauts came down with the diablovirus, but also that none of the crew had picked it up from anyone with such a light case that it was fairly indetectable.
No, it was just too painful to observe. Juss simply didn’t have the authority to act upon these visions in any meaningful way. He was just a troubleshooter, not a decision-maker.
Better to barrier himself against his precognition and concentrate on the things he could do to put Shepardsport in a better position once he went up to Engineering and reported for today’s shift.
2 replies on “Deep Thoughts”
Reading this installment had a curious effect on my literary response. I had been reading this series as what I think of as contemporary science fiction—set in worlds where the “miracles” reflect computers, virtual reality, genetics, and perhaps nanotech, with limited interplanetary space travel. I’d seen a hint or two about psi, but in the fictional reality it could have been simply an urban legend of the Moon. This episode makes that much less likely. But I think of psi as one of the tropes of older SF, along with FTL, time travel, large numbers of alien races, and perhaps supermen—the sort of thing that drove classic Star Trek plots. That’s a genre I can enjoy, but it seems retro, the way the habitable Mars and Venus of even older SF seemed retro after 1970 or so. I perceive the literary intent differently, as one more of nostalgia. Though I have to grant it’s in period for the SF of the era when the divergence took place.
The presence of psi in the Grissom timeline is one of those things that’s just peripheral enough that I can write stories in which it goes unmentioned, yet shares characters and settings with other stories in which it’s front and center. When I first started writing this project, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make it a definite part, so I’d avoided writing any segments from the POV of characters who have it, although one of them is a POV character in the novel I’m also working on (an expansion of The Moon Mirror), and in that his psi is front and center. Looking back, I’m thinking it may have been a mistake to start with a more ambiguous treatment and then have a scene in which it’s definitely real.