Crystal Silence by Shingo Fujisaki

Author:Shingo Fujisaki [Fujisaki, Shingo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Mars colony, artificial intelligence, AI, Mars, cyberspace, Japanese science fiction, Japanese SF, wetware, cyborgs, augmented reality, virtual reality
ISBN: 9784902075526
Publisher: Kurodahan Press
Published: 2019-10-08T20:00:00+00:00

Brushing her hair in front of the mirror, Saya paused.

“There are still a few left,” she muttered to herself as she separated several strands from her shoulder-length hair. The mirror automatically magnified them, reflecting several gray hairs. She carefully pulled each one out.

It had been much worse three days ago after returning to Physog, barely escaping death in her encounter with Jim. Several dozen strands of hair were completely gray, and a fistful was white at the ends. She felt as though she had aged ten years.

The stress she had experienced in Virdig had been tremendous. She’d thought of coloring her hair but had ended up pulling out the gray strands and cutting off the whitened ends. The thought of using hair color was too depressing.

For the past three days, she had barely been able to eat because of mental and emotional fatigue. Her skin was rough, and she felt far older than twenty-five. This morning, though, she was feeling better and seemed to be recovering.

Having spent those three days in a stupor, she went over what had happened. There had been changes for the better and for the worse.

The vaccine had finally arrived—that was a change for the better. With the exception of those in the final stages of infection, all the patients were showing signs of recovery. There was enough vaccine to inoculate the uninfected and healthy members as well; the infection had been contained.

But that was the extent of the government aid. Because of the quasi-Schwarzschild sphere that had enveloped the largest colony, all of the provisional administrative organizations had stopped functioning on Mars. Evacuation of the colonists continued to be delayed. One by one, the smaller colonies were swallowed up by the spheres.

Finally, even J-29 was covered by the red dome. These were the changes for the worse.

But life in the colony wasn’t threatened, and the scenery outside simply looked a little distorted. There was no heightened sense of isolation from the outside world. That was one of the reasons the evacuation of the colonists from Mars to Earth and the Moon colonies continued to be delayed. No one was able to accurately assess the extent of the danger.

Then something happened that began to indicate otherwise.

The quasi-Schwarzschild spheres that enveloped Mars Tokyo and Mars Osaka appeared to be shrinking. The images on the newscast left Saya feeling dumbfounded. A trench about forty centimeters wide encircled the red dome over Mars Tokyo. A close-up of the ground touching the dome showed a uniformly wide trench, forming a perfect arc with smooth edges.

It was not a trench that anyone had dug. The first theory was that the edges of the dome had eroded. If the sphere was a complete orb, half buried underground and strong gravity was being generated on its surface, the sand and rock bed adjacent to it would gradually erode. That was one plausible explanation. But when computations were made based on the dome’s surface gravity, it was found that erosion would not progress that rapidly even if the gravity was close to that of a white dwarf.

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