Then we hope your powers of persuasion are up to the task, Ilia.
Note290
Yes. We’re well into the field now. It wouldn’t be safe for us to descend much further, not without medical support. The physiological effects become quite upsetting. Another ten vertical metres, then we’ll call it a day.
Note291
It’s a little difficult to say, Remontoire. We’re within the influence of the machinery now, and the bulk properties of matter here — all matter, even the matter in your body — have been changed. The field that the machinery generates is suppressing inertia. What do you think you know about inertia, Remontoire?
Note292
It doesn’t have to be. Not now.
Note293
Not quite — but we’ve certainly learned to take the sting out of it.
Note294
Inertia is more mysterious than you might think, Remontoire.
Note295
It’s deceptively easy to define. We feel it every moment of our lives, from the moment we’re born. Push against a pebble and it moves. Push against a boulder and it doesn’t, or at least not very much. By the same token, if a boulder’s rushing towards you, you aren’t going to be able to stop it very easily. Matter is lazy, Remontoire. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it’s doing, whether that’s sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn’t mean we understand it. For a thousand years we’ve labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of what it really is.
Note296
We have an opening. More than a glimpse. Recently the Mother Nest has achieved reliable control of inertia on the microscopic scale.
Note297
I told you that the experiment gave us a signpost. It was almost enough to know that the technique was possible; that such a machine could exist. Even then it still took us years to build the prototype.
Note298
No… not entirely. We had a head start.
Note299
Another faction had explored something similar. The Mother Nest recovered key technologies relating to their work. From those beginnings — and the theoretical clues offered by the Exordium messages — we were able to progress to a functioning prototype.
Note300
The losses were extreme. We were fortunate that the mission was not a complete failure.
Note301
For years we worked to make it into something useful. Microscopic control of inertia — no matter how conceptually profound — was never of any real value. But lately we’ve had one success after another. Now we can suppress inertia on classical scales, enough to make a difference to the performance of a ship.
Note302
Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.
Note303
All previous attempts to understand inertia were doomed to failure because they approached the problem from the wrong standpoint. Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded. Matter itself has no intrinsic inertia.
Note304
It isn’t really a vacuum, not at the quantum level. It’s a seething foam of rich interactions: a broiling sea of fluctuations, with particles and messenger-particles in constant existential flux, like glints of sunlight on ocean waves. It’s the choppiness of that sea which creates inertial mass, not matter itself. The trick is to find a way to modify the properties of the quantum vacuum — to reduce or increase the energy density of the electromagnetic zero-point flux. To calm the sea, if only in a locally defined volume.
Note305
You’re experiencing the physiological effects of the field. Our inertial mass has dropped to about half its normal value. Your inner ear will be confused by the drop in inertia of the fluid in your semi-circular canal. Your heart will beat faster: it evolved to pump a volume of blood with an inertial mass of five per cent of your body; now it has only half that amount to overcome, and its own cardiac muscle reacts more swiftly to the electrical impulses from your nerves. If we were to go much deeper, your heart would start fibrillating. You would die without mechanical intervention.
Note306
It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.
Note307
No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.
Note308
Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.
Note309
You look ill. Shall we return upship?
Note310
Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction — creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling — state two — turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.
Note311
State three is a singularity in our calculations that we don’t expect to be physically realisable. All inertial mass vanishes. All matter in a state-three bubble would become photonic: pure light. We don’t expect that to happen; at the very least it would imply a massive local violation of the law of conservation of quantum spin.
Note312
Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I think. We’ve explored the properties of the device in a well-understood parameter space, but there’s no point in indulging in wild speculation.
Note313
Nightshade was chosen to be the prototype: the first ship to be equipped with inertia-suppression machinery. I ran some tests during the earlier flight, dropping the inertia by a measurable amount — enough to alter our fuel consumption and verify the effectiveness of the field, but not enough to draw
