The Reclamation of Eve—Chapter 4 of 6
Eve and one unwieldy airship VS a world of bad robots + Science IRL: manmade UFOs and free energy
Previously…Eve put her trust in Lucifer in a bid for freedom from the world she’s enslaved in. She packed up her baby cyborg clone, C-AI-n, and told Lucifer to transport the baby first, even though she couldn’t be certain of its welfare on the journey. The moment Lucifer left Eve’s universe with C-AI-n, a strange alarm blared…
Eve stumbled out to the control room.
No flashing lights on the power plant control screens, no blinking buttons calling for her attention. She pulled up the power plant's main control diagnostics. Nothing out of order.
A dull red glow replaced the soft yellow luminescence that usually lit the halls.
Adam's voice came over the speakers.
"Shelter in place, Eve. Standby for collection. Shelter in place, Eve. Standby..."
A clanking rumble came from the hall and she stumbled out of the control room. She turned to see the ash hauler bot lumbering through the hall toward her, its wide empty scoop scraping against the stone floor.
Adam's voice switched from the power plant hallway speakers to the hauler bot.
"Collection is imminent, prepare to board."
Eve turned and ran for the stairs. Blue was unplugged from the airship--maybe she could be safe there. She only hoped Lucifer could find her before--
Before what?
Adam had never collected her.
The scar around her arm ached with the memory of the months of pain from one accident with one bot. If they all suddenly turned against her--
Fear momentarily blinded her. A whole world of robots turning against her fragile body? The odds weren't worth calculating.
The image of those fourteen Eve C-AI's flashed in her mind. Maybe Adam always assumed he'd have to replace her, and that protocol could be cued if she became insubordinate.
Like she was just a bot with a glitch, he'd simply restart the Eve project.
Behind her, the hauler bot quickened its pace. Adam's voice got louder, repeating the command over and over.
In front of her, a row of fuel loader bots appeared around a corner, their long arms outstretched to block the full width of the hall.
Their network of Eve-friendly green pressure sensors blinked off.
Eve clenched her teeth. She would get to the airship and pilot it manually. Lucifer would return. She would not be destroyed.
She dug in her pockets for the biggest wrench.
Eve threw her hair behind her shoulders and ran toward the line of fuel loader bots. Roaring, she skidded on her knees between the bots' thin legs. The bots stopped and turned to follow her.
Eve's screamed--it was as if her scalp was on fire.
The closest bot had a fistful of her hair in its gripper. It lifted her slowly off the ground. Her wrench only clanged off its metal arms. The other bots formed a ring around her while her captor turned toward the advancing hauler bot. Eve dug in her coveralls for shears and hacked at her hair until she fell to the ground.
Her knees, her hips, her back all screamed, but she got to her feet. She lunged at the nearest pair of loader bots blocking her way, shoving the shears into their arms and prying them apart by opening the blades.
Eve sprinted to the stairs and climbed them three at a time.
She leapt onto the deck of the airship and wrenched the anchor attachments out of their sockets. The ship juddered against the tower in the wind, the balloon scraping against masonry. Eve ran to the helm and struggled to wind the ropes for each steering fan around her hands. She stumbled to the middle of the deck and hauled the fans open.
The wind bellied out the sails. Rope cut into her palms, and Eve's shoulders screamed with the effort to control the sails. Wind whipped her shorn hair around her face. She pulled with everything she had to open the starboard fan to turn the ship away from the tower. Without Blue, she had to fly herself, and without any manual controls. If only she had that steering mechanism she'd designed...
The fan lifted suddenly and the airship spun away from the power plant. Eve's arm flared with pain as the rope that held the fan yanked suddenly. Tears streamed and she dropped the portside rope.
Panting, Eve heaved at the starboard fan to slow the spin.
Once she was no longer dizzy she leaned against Blue's hull. Her injured arm felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She'd have to get the weight off her shoulder joint if she was to focus. With her good arm, she unzipped her coveralls, took a deep breath, and maneuvered the injured arm to lay against her stomach, supported by the coveralls.
The relief from the pain was not as much as she'd hoped for, but it was something. Now, all she had to do was navigate far from the tower, then stay afloat. On a ship she couldn't steer even with two good arms.
How long could Lucifer possibly take to come for her? She looked back, hoping to see him flying toward her already.
He is coming back.
Eve squinted against the scudding clouds. Total blinding whiteout as usual. Only now there was no autopilot.
Eve, the airship pilot of the A.S. Blue. Flying blind, and hunted.
But flying.
At last.
Her chest warmed and there was something like hunger in her belly, in spite of the pain in her shoulder.
Once the ship had moved well past the tower, she used her one good arm to tie off each fan carefully, making sure their angles and extension lengths matched to fly straight. Then she moved to the burner control and throttled the flames down until the airship descended back into clearer sky nearer the ground.
She didn't have long to feel proud though.
One of the twin flying bots descended out of the clouds. Adam's voice echoed out of its speakers.
"Land and prepare to be collected."
The bot circled around Eve, hovering just out of reach, its exhaust sputtering flames. She stared up at it, looking into its stupid empty glowing face. Over and over it issued the same command until Eve's head rang with the noise. She grit her teeth and wielded her hammer from her bib pocket.
The crunch it made against the bot's face was the most satisfying sound Eve had ever heard. Its head wobbled, its speakers squealed, then it launched itself upward.
Eve spat in its direction and laughed when it splashed back onto EveSpecs.
The ship shivered when the bot collided with Blue's balloon.
It stabbed at the balloon's fabric with a tapered metal tool Eve had invented for maintenance bots to plug holes in metal pipes. Each new puncture caused the Blue to fall like it was walking down steps.
Eve stared helplessly down at the ground rushing up. She'd never disobeyed Adam quite like this before. She knew she wasn't important to him, but she never thought he'd risk her life.
Suddenly another flying bot was winding its arms around her waist.
Rosie's voice suddenly blared out of the newcomer bot. Sparks were flying from its neck joint.
"I've got you, Eve!"
But Rosie's faulty flying bot body was shorting and twitching.
"Rosie, you genius! I think I have to save you first! Diagnosis?"
Rosie flashed a schematic of the wiring in the flying bot's neck onto EveSpecs. A junction glowed red. "Loose contact," Rosie said. "Had to reset to upload--was in a hurry. Careful of the reset button to the right of the contact. Don't flush me!"
Eve used the hammer's prongs to dislodge the bot's head from its neck.
The ground was rushing up quickly now, moving from big blobby masses of colors to surfaces with texture and terrible threatening height.
Eve dug around the bot's neck with fingers. Her hand shook. Her eyes streamed, blurring her vision. She pinched the faulty junction but it shorted and sparked.
The roar of the wind intensified, echoing against the land rushing up to meet her and her nursebot. She was out of time.
Blue's hull crashed into solid rock. Eve's bones shook as if the splintering structure were her own, as it soon would be.
But they were lifted up back into the sky before her own body crumpled into unyielding earth.
She pressed her face against a soft red cloth with a golden S.
To be Continued…
Author’s Note
Yeah, I said “thrust-thirsty” in my Science article this week. That’s that, I coined it. That’ll be my girl punk band name.
In all seriousness, I’ve just started a new project that I hope you’re going to love, and angry lady music is really setting the vibe for the protagonist for me. The new story may or may not (but definitely does) jump off from this current short serial about Eve. I’m so excited to be building this world out!
All of the Science in Real Life articles that have accompanied this story are foundational for the technology in that story. This wasn’t the plan, but I’m thrilled about the result.
Look for the main character reveal and a sneak peak next week!
Science in Real Life:
Zero Point Energy — Free, Limitless Propulsion
So you’ve got a *thrust-thirsty, power-hungry Worldship dead in the proverbial water out in space until you come up with its propulsion system. Or you’re Lucifer about to jump from one universe to another to emancipate Eve and her wee baby cyborg.
You need two things:
1) Enormous amounts of energy for propulsion
2) A path between universes
This week, let’s talk about solving problem 1.
What if you could summon energy from space itself?
What do you think of when you think of space? The deep darkness between planets and stars? Emptiness? Vacuum?
The vacuum is actually a media itself—a sea of a kind—not at all a perfect absence of matter and energy. Space is actually teaming with tiny subatomic particles and electromagnetic fields that are constantly fluctuating around their baseline “zero” value. This media is called the Quantum Vacuum, or Zero Point Energy (ZPE) Field.
ZPE field of constantly fluctuating electromagnetic fields and quantum particles. Credit:
Siegel, E. (2020, April 18). Ask Ethan: What is the “zero-point energy” of space? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/18/ask-ethan-what-is-the-zero-point-energy-of-space/?sh=34da93c7ecb4
The Zero Point Energy Field is responsive—we can interact with it. And we know that if we could harness all the energy in even a volume so small as a coffee mug, you would find enough power to boil all the oceans on our planet.
Stick a quantum engine coffee mug on your Worldship and you effectively have free energy—propellantless propulsion.
“…the question is whether the ZPE can be “mined” at a level practical for use in space propulsion. Given that the ZPE energy density is conservatively estimated to be on the order of nuclear energy densities or greater, it would constitute a seemingly ubiquitous energy supply, a veritable “Holy Grail” energy source.” (Puthoff & Little, 2010)
So how do we make an engine that runs on ZPE? As mentioned in the problem statement, we need enormous amounts of energy and a super cold receptor in the engine. That scale of active cooling needed is way beyond our current technological capability—it would take more energy to chill than it would ultimately give. Are we talking about freezing the entire ocean now, you ask?
Glad you’re keeping up! Seems like a thermodynamic do-loop, right?
Here we’re going to make a massive assumption (again).
Let’s say we figure this out.
If we managed that first leap—what would this engine be doing?
The 3 Things your Propellantless Engine is Up to:
1) De-coupling your ship from gravity
2) Reducing your inertial mass
3) Generating the energy required to do 1 and 2
How close are we to achieving these things?
Nikola Tesla was after this in his heyday in the 30’s. Some say he managed to invent a perfect transmitter, though somehow it’s eluded capture.
Later, in the 60’s ,the Canadian military worked on a hovercraft that was meant to be powered by the Zero Point Energy field. When their funding ran out, they handed it over the border to the US Air Force Skunkworks. The project culminated in this on UFO-style ship called a fluxliner. This one, the Avrocar, actually levitated, y’all. With a pilot on board!
ZPE-powered vehicle: manmade UFO performs smooth hoverboard maneuvers. Credit & Video:
Holmstrom, H. (2021, March 25). Avrocar: The U.S. Military’s Flying Saucer. The Unwritten Record. https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/04/03/avrocar-the-u-s-militarys-flying-saucer/
Ultimately though, the project was unable to produce sufficient thrust for the rapid vertical takeoff expected from the theory, and the predicted price tag to fix the issue was ludicrous. The project was abandoned, but you can visit the craft in a museum and read all about the weird enterprise.
Today, there are still pockets of funding and research ongoing to explore the 3 Things you’d need to harness ZPE, as well as concepts to address the cold source problem.
This is one of many enticing concepts based on theoretical physics that is power and money limited—depending on big advances in experimental and applied technologies to vet out.
References:
Puthoff, H. E., & Little, S. R. (2010). Engineering the Zero-Point Field and Polarizable Vacuum For Interstellar Flight. Arxiv.org. Retrieved June 30, 2023, from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.5264.pdf
Next Week: we’ll talk about solving problem 2 with a path between universes using Quantum Entanglement Teleportation
Stay tuned!
Much love, and see you next time, my nerds.