300 Conception
Donovan did not like the feel of fabric on his body, at least not in the moment. Even if the sheets were among the softest and most delicate they could purchase on such short notice, the touch of anything short of warm air stung him. Even then he was not reacting to the pain, it wasn't strong enough to warrant it. He had been asking for it with the stunt he pulled anyways.
For someone with first hand experience with Split decay, particularly experience with how painful and annoying recovery could be, he wasn't particularly concerned with pushing the limit.
With some difficulty, he dragged an arm out in front of him, the darkness concealing the damage he knew would be there. Bruises were probably wrapped around his body like vines, the first visible stage of Split decay Arc had a record of. With some luck those would vanish or become faint enough to evade Diana's notice by the time he returned to Nectar, or maybe he could concoct some reason for her not to visit Sol with the bruising as evidence.
No, that wouldn't do. He was already pushing the line with a valid reason to lie. Piling some bullshit excuse on top to cover for his own reckless behavior would only insult her further should the lie be exposed. Donovan would tell a roundabout truth - he had been experimenting with split and it just happened to do this to him - technically not a lie but not entirely honest either. At most a slap on the wrist and stern talking to could be expected, alongside a promise to not do something stupid again.
A promise which would be promptly forgotten the next time he needed to do something important.
It was shocking how frequently the adjectives 'important' and 'stupid' overlapped. Some things were stupidly important, others important and stupid, while a select few items were important because of their stupidity, like pleasantries, ceremonies, and small talk. The subject dominating Donovan's mind at the moment also fell into that particular area of the Venn Diagram, rest.
Rest was important to recovery both physically and mentally, providing the body a low stress environment to focus on repair and allowing the brain to shut off and recuperate. Without it one's body and mind would degrade, struggling to think properly and gradually losing control of fine motor functions due to fatigue. Donovan did not think this process was stupid, even machines required periodic maintenance to continue their proper function, however humans are not machines.
Most machines needed maintenance because the components being cared for accrued damage, fatigue, or wear over the course of normal operation, though sometimes they just needed a moment to cool down or some fluids replaced. However, this did not necessarily mean that a machine needed to be shut down in order to be maintained. In a few cases, usually lower level menial tasks that did not require much in the way of concentration, it is theoretically possible to perform the necessary labor while the machine is running. The only reason the machine is stopped is to ensure the safety of the person working on the machine.
Of course humans, as previously stated, are not machines. In other words, they are not subject to these maintenance safety standards, or at least they shouldn't be. Almost everything that happens to the human body while sleeping can happen while awake, it just happens to be either less efficient or slower. The only thing that wouldn't happen while awake was dreaming, which was not much of a loss in his opinion. This made sleep important (humans could not function without it) but stupid (in theory it wasn't necessary).
Donovan had no intentions of fixing this 'stupidity' for others, by and large they seemed to enjoy it, but as he lay there in a damaged and unproductive state he wondered if it might be possible to solve the problem for himself. He now had access to Split, something his predecessors lacked, so if he could figure out a way to handle those minor repairs without falling asleep he could open up as much as eight hours in a twenty four hour cycle to work on other stuff, not to mention staving off losses in efficiency associated with mental and physical fatigue.
He just didn't know how.
From experience, Donovan gathered this desire of his should be within the realms of possibility - his visit to the Arboreal Maiden demonstrated the Velar (or at the very least gods more generally) could survive and remain conscious whilst subject to damage far in excess of what any human could - he just didn't know how to approach this problem of perpetual consciousness with his limited experience. All the more reason to practice Split, he supposed.
"Shall I prepare a shower?" Donovan's mind was wrested from its musings as Arc spoke. "Or do you have plans to sleep in?"
"I'm going to stay here fore a few more minutes." Donovan considered his situation for a moment before continuing. "I would like the shower though."
Even if he was hurting, Donovan would eventually have to get up and be productive. A shower would let him clean off and gauge the extent of the damage visually - he wanted to see what Split decay looked like in the mirror.
"And an MRI."
- - - - -
Donovan turned about in front of the sink, moving different parts of his body into various poses to get a good look at the web of bruising across his body in the mirror. Truth be told the damage didn't appear to be particularly severe, at least not on the surface. Sure, it hurt to touch anything, particularly near his sternum where the webbing was most concentrated, but pain wasn't always directly proportional to the degree of injury sustained.
A papercut was hardly something to be concerned about, but it could produce a similar level of pain to a much greater cut. Donovan understood this to be the result of higher nerve densities in the parts of the body papercuts were likely to occur, such as one's fingertips, so an equivalent number of nerve endings could be 'hit' with a much smaller area of effect.
At first he theorized the pain he felt followed a similar form of logic, the decay principally occurring around nerve clusters and therefore magnifying the perceived severity, but he shot that down almost immediately. The nervous system didn't sprawl across the surface like a net, which implied little correlation between visually confirmed damage and perceived. As far as he could tell, this meant one of two things.
The first and most likely was simply a lack of visual feedback in damaged areas. Bruising was the result of blood vessels subjected to some physical trauma which ruptured them and leaked blood beneath the skin. It was a visible sign of injury to be sure, but it didn't mean that all of the pain he felt could be represented by a physical marker. The bruising could just be areas where more severe decay had occurred, so while the rest was still damaged it wasn't enough to rupture any capillaries.
The second was that the pain response to physical contact was not at all related to the nervous system. He still hadn't quite grasped how split 'felt' in the sense that he could feel it moving inside of his body, but did not yet know how to associate those feelings to a physical equivalent. There was no hot or cold, hard or soft, but maybe he just hadn't been sensitive enough to tell if it was any of those things. Pain, however, was a much simpler concept to parse than abstract information like temperature or resistance to applied force. Pain was something his body had a sensory equivalent to, so it would make sense for the one time he could sense a quality of split rather than its quantity would be 'pain'.
It was a stretch, but he could see some degree of potential in it.
Satisfied with his inspection, which was becoming harder to perform in a fogging mirror, he turned around and approached the shower. Now that he took a second to think about what a shower was, and what he suffering from at the moment, he regretted his decision. Thousands of droplets of hot water impacting sensitive skin, followed by rough pressure to clean the skin in question.
This was going to be torturous.
- - - - -
Arc observed a redder than usual Donovan as he flipped through some reports on his tablet, quite comfortably reclined in the cockpit.
"Are you in pain?" Arc knew the answer to the question well before he asked it. There might not be a camera in the bathroom, but there were microphones. Donovan probably could have passed off as performing an exotic ritual with how much he grunted and groaned in the shower, though Arc really only needed to observe the stiffness of his movements and change in gait.
"Very much so, hence why I asked for an MRI."
"I see."
"I would very much like to have said MRI."
"I will not run one without someone else present."
"Protocol?"
"Safety. I am uncomfortable having you enter the machine in your present state without someone else present. Should you have a negative reaction or become otherwise incapacitated inside, I will have no method of assisting you."
"And you can help me if I am incapacitated outside of the machine?"
"Yes." Donovan recoiled in surprise, leading Arc to make a sound approximate to a sigh. "Have you forgotten about the nanobots?"
". . . sort of . . ."
"Those nanobots can be used to render limited aid in extenuating circumstances, however the MRI emits a magnetic field strong enough to fry the internals of any nanobot for approximately twenty minutes after the ramp down sequence has started. An emergency shut down would likely destroy the machine given the . . . substandard . . . quality of material used in its construction."
"Rapid unplanned disassembly?"
"The safety of anyone inside could be compromised, yes."
"Then I will heed your warning." Donovan returned to his reading. "I really would have liked that information though."
"As would I, though I doubt something skin deep would have revealed much about the specifics of Split decay." Arc was aware of how bad it could get, so while early symptoms might be nice to have a remedy for they weren't the priority. "And you are certain you feel alright?"
"It was just the surface layer sluffing off. So long as you keep the temperature up I'll be fine." If Donovan's account of the shower was anything to go by, the experience was equal parts horrifying and fascinating. What he described as 'sheets' of skin slid off of his body in the warm water, taking with it the majority of the netted bruising the two had been so concerned about. Arc was not entirely surprised by this, the extreme version of decay practically dissolved his flesh, but it still sounded like something one would be paralyzed in fear about. "It was like a bad sunburn."
"Even if the shedding of the epidermis is technically a symptom of sunburn, I would not compare the two."
"I look sunburned, don't I?"
"That is besides the point." Arc wanted to continue the argument, fearing for Donovan's safety otherwise, but he clearly did not care. "Might I ask what prompted your interest in system ring engineering?"
"Remember our conversation about what to do with this place?"
"I cannot forget it."
"I've decided on what I want to build here."
"A system ring?"
"A complex of orbital structures anchored to a series of segmented system rings. I was going through the list of challenges traditionally associated with them, and it doesn't look like any of them are problems anymore, or at least I don't think they'll be problems."
"Oh? How do you mean?"
"Go through the list and I'll answer. I'd like you to find issues with my reasoning." Donovan 'pushed' the article he was reading to Arc, who he seemed to imagine as sitting above and behind him. "For the record, I plan on the innermost ring being of the habitable variety, which seem to have the most issues associated with them, followed by elements of a Matrioshka Brain for you and factory and fortification segments beyond that."
"'The Niven Commission: Findings and Hypotheses on the Feasibility and Engineering of System Wide Orbiting Ring Structures.' I see you've selected one of the older pieces on the subject."
"Most of the reports that came after either referenced or built upon the Niven Commission's work. I thought it would be a good starting point to determine whether or not what I had in mind could be possible."
"Then I will begin with the general problems. How will we handle the acquisition of materiel?" Arc thought this was an immediate wall Donovan could not scale. If he considered even the smallest interpretation of Donovan's goal, they would need an amount of mass on par with a star, several orders of magnitude beyond what they could dream of acquiring in an efficient manner.
"I accept that it will take a long time to gather it all, but there seem to be plenty of star systems without an 'owner', though I don't think we'll be needing to go gray goo on this one. I've been told that planets possess the ability to regenerate mineral deposits across relatively short periods of time . . . we might be able to accrue enough resources over the course of a thousand years with a large enough base of planets." Donovan was, of course, leaving the obvious implication they might be able to mimic this capacity unsaid. Basing his theory on the assumption they could somehow produce metals from nothing would have received an admonishment from each and every one of his educators. Arc would do no such thing, but he might have pushed back on such an assumption without supporting evidence. "We can call it a Resource Reich."
"I would avoid association with that particular empire title given the implications, however I will not dismiss your proposition on its face. It is certainly worthy of discussion." Arc was already setting up generation and logistic regimes for the creation, transportation, and processing of such an reality. "How will you handle the stresses on materiel?"
"A ton of those split engines pushing inwards to counteract the centrifugal force. No mass propellant means we won't be running out of gas to keep it going. I admit I don't know if keeping those engines running will cause some other problem with the subspace or whatever it interacts with, but if it isn't an issue the stresses aren't either."
"What about an uneven mass distribution?"
"See previous answer."
"Gravitational instability?"
"Same as the last."
"Meteorological unpredictability?"
"A test section can be used to gauge what happens. It isn't like there needs to be a classic atmosphere with meteorological phenomena if it turns out there are problems."
"Bioseeding and ecological maintenance?"
"Import plants and animals, possibly genetically engineered, and leave it to you. Shocked you had to ask that one."
"Shadow squares responsible for the day-night cycle and thermal regulation?"
"We can make them into space stations, Bishop Rings wrapped around the primary ring, or O'Neill Cylinders. Stabilization problems for them would be handled in the same way as the ringworld proper."
"Waste management?"
"We have the space between stars to dump the unrecyclable shit in, if anything ends up as 'unrecyclable' in the first place."
"Waste collection?"
"We are considering a scenario where the available energy for propulsion is effectively infinite. We can figure out whether a ship based aggregation system or a complex of subterranean conveyance systems to a centralized location is more efficient during design."
"What about debris and meteor strikes?"
"Copious amounts of sensor arrays, debris sweepers, and Whipple Plating around key components. If we develop a projectable shield capable of interacting with large bodies of mass, then we use that too."
"You've certainly put some thought into this . . ." Arc didn't think any of his answers were perfect, but for a preliminary stab at a problem that was effectively impossible before his time it was a damn good showing. At the very least, he thought it was worth a level of independent research.
"Truth be told, I'm more interested in the factory and fortress portions. Assuming Sol grows up into a tree like the Great Csillacra, the ringworld will probably be rendered obsolete and people can just live on her." Arc had assumed that was the direction Donovan was heading with the segmented system ring concept to begin with, hence his slight surprise when a ringworld proper was brought up, however it seemed like Donovan was also aware of this potentiality.
It also didn't make sense to build a ringworld for habitation around a star that wasn't giving off light, but Arc was under the impression Donovan was experiencing a bout of mild insanity. He had been worn down physically, mentally fatigued, and was likely experiencing tremendous amounts of pain, which would be enough to drive anybody to irrational assumptions about a hypothetical situation.
"Do you think you can handle such a factory?"
"All of this madness and my capabilities are what you question?"