brownian motion

The other day I learned about sun spiders and was inspired by their namesake to write this story. This story has nothing to do with sun spiders.

“Ship ahoy!”

I rush into the bridge to see it for myself. The point-cloud of the lidar screen shows an unmistakable blip. Idas hands me the optical sights and there it is, seventeen miles in the distance: a mountain of metal jutting up from the ground, its hull resting at an awkward tilt from the desert floor. It looks like a beached whale.

“Ten degrees towards starboard. Full speed ahead!”

Idas shouts this command seemingly to herself. She’s the one at the helm, after all. Idas slams the throttle lever and the twin engines of the Flying Manatee react with gusto, though a little sleepily; the electric motors spool up farther, pushing her faster forwards with a greater sense of urgency, and watching the monitors I sense the voltage readings sag before the batteries compensate for the increased burden. But of course, it is unsustainable. Father, though his head is buried in a pillow in the living-room cabin, has noticed this already.

“Open up the extra panels, boy!”

A mechanical whirring confirms the deployment of the auxiliary solar arrays, emerging like blue butterfly wings from their armoured sheaths, reorienting themselves to seek out the sunlight, then locking into place.

Flying Manatee is neither new nor fast, but I think she is beautiful. She is a nine-hundred-ton beast of a landship, outfitted with egregious amounts of sun-bleached armor and a computerized monitoring system wired by yours truly. For a converted military vehicle she is surprisingly comfortable. The cabin is decked out with mahogany planks, decorated with technical procedures and Pokemon posters, and currently filled with the gentle C-major melody of Fly Me to the Moon. Father loves classical music. Manty’s lower decks are filled with barrels of salvaged copper wire; her holds are filled with salvaged steel plate and ten tons of solid-state lithium-ion batteries. She clips along at a steady fifteen knots, and behind her a wake of dust rises disturbed into the tedious air.

Once, not too long ago, though too long ago for my mind to have been able to hold on to the memories, this was a real sea, with boundless stretches of water. Father tells of it often, how they used to fish in this desert plain.

“Jason! Are you writing again?”
“Just let me finish this part, okay?”
“Go tend to the navigation, boy. I’ll narrate. I know it firsthand, after all.”

Where shall we begin?

Like all good stories, we’ll start with the day the scientists poured two million tons of aerosolized silicate gel into the atmosphere. It was designed to refract the Sun’s light, to divert it away into clouds and reflect it back into space, to cool the earth below. They tuned the refractive index to be just above that of air, enough to scatter shortwave radiation while letting the longwave heat bleed back out. In the models, it was elegant. A dandy little planetary parasol. At first it seemed to work. But the men who made the chemical formation overlooked a glaring fact: it was incredibly, incredibly, cohesive. After a few years the particles began to aggregate. Convection cells gathered them. Updrafts fed them, as they grew ever larger, ever more greedy.

Today, the massive globular lenses of condensate, glasslike and terrific, drift through the atmosphere, focusing sunbeams to a point, turning fields to ash and seas to steam. Where they pass, the ground burns like streaks from a ballpoint pen miles across, and nothing grows again. And the lenses don’t scatter efficiently anymore. They focus and they destroy. The Earth warms ever more, and the waters become ever drier. So the world burns. So the world ends!

“Father, maybe that's too much.”
“Hush, boy. I'm not done yet.”

Maybe if the scientists of the world came together again, they would be able to do it right this time. But the great cities are gone, crisscrossed by flattening sunburn. We are no longer the men who harnessed the earth, whose hubris led them to destroy nature and believe they could fix it. We are the remnants, the nomads. We are the solifugues.

We are those who flee from the Sun.

We crawl the basin of the Adriatic and plumb the scattered dredges of the Mediterranean maritime trade. We are the crustaceans that wipe clean the bones of empires drowned in sand.

“How’s that for a monologue, boy?”

Father grunts as he shifts himself towards the cabin. He pulls out the map and his old brass sextant. We are three days south of the Balkans. The lidar starts blinking louder. We are six minutes south of our next salvage.

I disengage the power to the engines and Flying Manatee goes silent. Now she is drifting, quietly, along the desert sands. Her momentum will carry her the rest of the way. Idas leans over the forward scope, one eye shut, tracking the shimmer on the horizon.

Manty opens her maws. A few seconds later, she bites into the metal hull of the ship and jerks to a stop. It’s a reassuring sound, maybe a bit like a bone getting crushed by a falling gong. Twelve harpoons sling across the air and embed themselves deep in the skin of the ship.

Manty’s forward jaws, a leech’s mouth of tungsten-carbide shears nested in a ring of hydraulic pistons, close around the hull plating. The metal resists for a fraction of a second, tension rippling through the frame, and then it gives. It dies in a long, ragged groan as rivets shear and weld seams unzip themselves in a cascade of stuttering sparks.

“Pressure steady,” I mutter, eyes flicking across the console. The load cells spike before their readings settle. Good. No stall. Sand grinds beneath us, anchoring Manty’s bulk as the jaws retract, dragging a slab of oxidized steel inward.

“Again, boy,” Father calls from behind me.

Each stroke carves deeper into the carcass, peeling it open layer by layer. The outer hull gives way to structural ribs. Manty adjusts automatically, torque shifting, cutters angling to find the weak points.

Idas slews us a degree to port. The jaws come down along a seam line, and this time the cut runs cleaner, faster. A section of plating collapses inward with a hollow boom, exposing the dark interior: corridors packed with dust, cables hanging like dried kelp.

“Conduit cluster, forward hold,” I say. “Copper, maybe intact.”

“Take it, boy,” Father replies.

Manty’s secondary arms deploy with a clatter, articulated claws and magnetic grapples reaching into the opening. They move with a strange delicacy compared to the jaws, as if they are carving the spermaceti from a whale, plucking, sorting, tearing free lengths of wire and bundles of piping. The cargo belts whine to life, carrying the spoils aft into the holds where they vanish into the dark.

The rhythm settles in. The hull shudders with each impact, vibrations traveling up through the deck into my boots.

“Watch the load,” Idas says.

“I see it.” The numbers climb again as the jaws catch on something thicker. The keel structure, maybe. I ease the limiter back a fraction. No point snapping a piston this far from shelter.

Manty growls, low and mechanical, and the obstruction yields with a sound like distant thunder. A massive section of frame twists free and slams into the intake. The desert wind slips through the torn hull and hums along its empty corridors, as if the ship is trying, even now, to remember the sound of the sea.

Suddenly the atmospheric radar chirps. Idas’s voice fires off the reading.

“Two lenses, fifteen kilometers diameter, ten kilometers ahead, drifting northwest.”

Father looks at the screen. “It’s too close. We need to disengage.”
“We’re almost through the good part. Let’s finish it off,” I say.
“Maybe we can come back later.”
“Idas, if we come back later this ship is going to be a boiling mass of iron and copper and sand all melted together. You think we have a refinery on board?”

Behind us, the first lens comes into view―or rather, its effects. The sunbeams burn hot enough to fuse sand into glass. It paves an expanse of sizzling windowpane, seemingly a good distance away. It looks almost beautiful.

“Jason! It’s getting closer!”
“Just one last pass...”
“Jason!” Father screams in all capital letters. The heat washes over me and when I regain my senses, the harpoons are gone, the jaws are closed, the navigation lidar is black, Idas is at the throttle and the Flying Manatee is pushing forward at full speed.

The lens is moving at seventeen knots and nearly burning Manty’s rear end. At this rate, the beam will overtake us soon, will vaporize our ship, which, even with a full complement of armor and radiators fully deployed, can't withstand the heat for long, but it’s too late for us to try to sidestep the massive wall of sunlight advancing upon us, just a few hundred meters away now. Our only choice is to run directly away from it. But we need to go faster, we need more power, but the engines are already at maximum, so we can’t, unless we―but that would be such a shame―

“Dump the cargo holds!”
“But Father―”
“Do it, boy!”

The hold spills open and the miles of copper and metal scrap tumble onto the desert. Lightened of her treasures, the Flying Manatee starts living up to the first part of her namesake. Idas pushes the throttle over its maximum rating and our ship hits sixteen, seventeen, nineteen knots, racing the Sun along the Adriatic.

And then it is over. Sunset turns to dusk turns to midnight. Father pushes open the hatch. The damage is not too bad, he says, though the lidar is shot. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Idas says, and I nod resignedly, and Father laughs a little, and says that at least it’ll make for good writing material. The lens, passing overhead, refracts the stars, making them shimmer in the night. The constellations stretch and shear. Father pulls out the sextant and announces that we are two days south of the Balkans. Exhausted, we sleep outside on the sand.

When dawn rises the Flying Manatee sets out once more. Cruising along at fourteen knots on the desert floor, she spreads her solar arrays like butterfly wings. We have not been journeying for too long when Idas’s voice cries out.

“Ship ahoy!”

I rush into the bridge to see for myself. Idas hands me the optical sights and there it is, off in the distance.