S2E6 ~ Fortress On the Sun

Hello and welcome to the Post-apocalyptic Podcast.

My name is Charles Arthur and I'll be your host as we talk about all your favorite post-apocalyptic

stories.

We'll be looking at movies, books, television series and video games.

No matter the medium, if it takes place at the end of the world, we are here for it.

Welcome to Post-apocalyptic.

So we have had a change in our schedule and if you listen regularly, you've already caught

it.

Last week, I said that this week we would be covering Fallout New Vegas.

But in the meantime, life happened and it's been a busy and difficult week.

And I got to Friday and realized I hadn't even started to write a script.

Now I love that game.

It's the Fallout game that I have the most time in, something like 1,500 hours.

Yes, I know.

But it's worth it.

And I would be absolutely disappointed in myself if I didn't give it the time and effort

it deserves.

So we're going to bump that story until later in the season.

Fortunately, I had another script that already started and I wasn't sure where I was going

to put it anyways because it was a late addition to the schedule.

So we're going to do that instead.

Now we've covered many apocalypsees on this show with as many different outcomes as

reasons for existence.

We always look at it through the eyes of the survivors, which is a strange thing if you

think about it because if the world was to end, most of us would be going with it.

We would be ending as well.

The odds that any one of us would be a survivor are pretty thin.

But let's overlook those odds for a minute because I want to ask you a different question

today.

What if the world ended and you didn't even know it?

The story we're looking at today is not well known.

I'm almost 100% certain that you have not read it.

And that's a shame because it's pretty good.

On 2005, I picked up a science fiction novel at my local library and I decided to give

it a try.

I've read it, loved it, returned it, and it's been living in my head ever since.

So recently I was ordering some other books that we will be covering this season and I ran

across a used copy of that book again.

I ordered it and reread it and only then did I realize that it fits the theme of our

show perfectly.

That book was Paul Cook's 1997 novel Fortress on the Sun.

Now right away you hear that title and you think this is going to be ridiculous.

I assure you it is not.

And suspending your disbelief enough to think that humanity could put a structure on

the surface of the sun or at least as much of a surface as the sun has should be easy

enough if you're into science fiction.

So bear with me.

But as always there will be spoilers ahead.

Now usually I say that I cover the story with the assumption that you're familiar with

it and so spoilers are to be expected.

In this case I am 100% certain you are not familiar with it.

But because it's a bit rare and as far as I can tell out of print it's unlikely that

you will find a copy anytime soon.

So in this case we'll have spoilers because I want to represent this somewhat hard to

obtain story as well as I can as this might be your only exposure to it.

It's the same reasoning I applied last season when we covered the last chase which is also

kind of a rare story to find.

But just in case you do have access to a copy and you'd like to read it over before we

go on I'll still pause here and give you a chance to do that.

Also I should say ahead of time that when we come back my summary will be a little longer

and more involved than it usually is in fact that's going to take up the book of this episode.

My observations at the end won't take particularly long but I really want to get across the

heart of this story because as I said it's unlikely that you've read it.

So I really want to portray it well so we'll have a slightly longer than usual summary.

So let's pause now and when we come back we'll jump into that.

Ian Hutchings is literally ruling in hell.

Ian is a prisoner in the most unconventional prison in existence.

The prison is called raw and it is a mining station tethered to the surface of the sun.

Now it takes in raw solar plasma with all of its fusible elements and it converts it into

raw materials or shipment out to the rest of the solar system.

The world's in stations of the system assembly and the system assembly is fairly large.

It's earth, it's Mars, it's some of the moons in the solar system and then there are

some space station based colonies as well.

So quite a lot of people, quite a few worlds of various sizes.

Once upon a time that was Ross's entire reason for existence until the assembly's ruling

council called its crew home and replaced them with a group of prisoners all guilty of

especially heinous crimes.

Now that was three years ago and in the day since Ian the most monstrous criminal of

them all has served as the station's administrator and you would think it's a worthy sentence

after all the inmates crimes are numerous and bloody, murders, terrorism, treason and

so forth.

Ian's crime is evil beyond description as he is responsible for the deaths of a billion

people, a crime for which he punishes himself by wearing massive golden shackles on his

wrists and feet, shackles formed from the station's mineral output.

There's just one small issue, none of them can remember their crimes.

You see, a condition of their incarceration is that their memories of their crimes and

indeed the entire surrounding segments of their lives have been blocked, not expunged

but placed behind a wall in their minds and that's wall with the capital W, that's

how they think of it, the wall beyond which they cannot see.

Ian has been picking away at this wall for years, not just seeking his own memories but

trying to understand the reasoning behind it because no two walls are the same.

Ian has lost several years of his life, everything since his graduate studies, although he

retains the knowledge and skills he learned in graduate school but he cannot remember the

events that they're learning or the events in between.

Some of the crew have lost more, some less.

Some have lost so much that they have been regressed all the way to childhood despite

living in adult bodies, so they refer to them as little boys and little girls because

they behave like children, even though they have adult bodies.

Some of those skills they cannot explain because their history has been lost, none of it

makes any sense.

But the crew tries anyway and in the meantime they keep the station running and they care

for each other, until today you see they were told that every three years more prisoners

about 25 at a time would be sent to join them and today is the day.

Let's introduce our cast or at least the ones that we'll deal with the most.

There's Ian, Ian Hutchings, Massive, Imposing, Also Brilliant.

In his past life he was a biochemist specializing in nanotechnology, although he can't remember

what he may have done with those skills.

He is sometimes called the Annihilist for his alleged crimes.

Then there's Hugh Bladestone, he's the ship's physician, he cannot remember medical school

and yet his skills remain sharp.

Hugh has two assistants, Kristen Barron and Diane Beckwith.

Then there's Catherine DeWitt, Kate for short, she's about 39 or 40 years old, she's

not entirely sure, but she is missing everything in her memory after age 26.

She leads the team that runs the Sun Cup, which is the station's mining infusion facility

down in the lower levels.

She is also Ian's sometime bedmate, but don't be fooled by that term, they're not lovers

in the traditional sense, they have a fondness for each other, but there's no sexual relationship

here.

That is because whatever was done to these people to create the wall in their heads

as a side effect, it also removes all sexual desire and function.

So aboard raw, lots of people have bedmates, but that is for comfort rather than gratification.

However, as I said, there is an affection between these two and sometimes both Ian and Kate

think that it's possible, there may have been something between them prior to their incarceration,

but they don't know that for sure.

Going on, there's Pablo Ramirez, he is the chief fiddler.

The fiddlers are a cadre of roving engineers on the station, they fix things and build

things as they see fit and also at the request of Ian and some of the others.

There's Lorraine Sparry, she is the station's head of security.

She oversees a network of roving security drones, they call them Tonka's because they're

shaped like the little Tonka trucks, toys that at least were around when I was a child

and I guess they still are.

And then there are the children, the little boys and little girls.

None of them are children in a physical sense.

They all have adult bodies, but their walls stretch so far back into their minds as to

reduce them to the mental state of children, as I said before.

Two of them are significant to our story.

There's Matthew White, who, despite being regressed to a little boy, appears to have

the skills of a competent pilot.

In fact, in his room, he, in his dormitory, he has rebuilt what appears to be the pilot

station of a spaceship with almost uncanny accuracy.

So something is leaking through and they're pretty sure he was a pilot before.

And then there's BB Wasson, we don't know much about her, but she is significant for

what eventually happens to her and we don't know what her skills were prior to regression.

And then we have some new arrivals.

Now Ian is present at what they call the Shunt platform.

This is a teleportation platform, the Shunt is a teleporter.

So Ian is there at the platform when they arrive, and despite the assembly's promises,

there are only six of them, not the 25 that they were promised.

They are led by a man named Newsom Claim.

He is a suspicious and interesting man and he is in for 40,000 counts of murder among

other crimes.

There is Edward Plainfield, in for crimes related to insurrection.

There is Dylan Oaks, imprisoned for detonation of a nuclear weapon in almost 5,000 deaths,

and Dylan is also regressed to childhood.

And then we have Arles Carolyn Adamson, who in for prostitution and blackmail, Clarissa

Pickerall, in for substance distribution and other crimes, and Rhonda Berry in for treason.

None of these new arrivals are adjusting very well and problems start to arise almost immediately.

Plain is hostile and arrogant toward everyone.

He refuses to cooperate with even routine medical exams.

And the others are all varying degrees of anti-social.

The first real indication of trouble though happens when their food processing system,

which they call the Sally, starts to have problems.

Regular foods come out foul, completely foreign substances start appearing, and this happens

not very long after the newcomers arrive.

All this time some of the prisoners, especially Kate and Hugh, they have been having strange

nightmares.

And in every case, someone in the dream will mention something they call the traces and

will warm the dreamer about them.

So definitely not a coincidence that this is happening.

Kate for one, I should mention, doesn't think oddly about that term, the traces like she

notices it, but it kind of fits in with her dreams because Kate lived on a farm when

she was younger and had horses.

And the word trace in this sense, like the traces, traces is a word for the saddle and

other harness of a horse.

So she recognizes it in that sense.

So she doesn't think too much of it.

Hugh, however, is unfamiliar with the term and it really sticks out to him.

There's one more being on the station that I haven't mentioned and that is the vapor.

The vapor is a robot, but its full capabilities are unknown.

It's only appeared once that was when Ian first arrived.

The vapor gave him a tour of the station and a list of instructions and rules and then

it retreated into an off-limit section of the station right in the middle called the

Forbidden Zone, where presumably it still waits.

But the crew live in fear of the vapor because violation of any of its rules will be considered

of vapor injunction.

And the crew nearly got their first vapor injunction a year earlier when one of them tried to escape

the station and died in the process.

But the counter is never reset and getting two vapor injunctions means that the vapor

will shut down the shields, the winner shields that protect the station, allowing it to

be, well, vaporized, no pun intended, along with everyone on board.

And the crew nearly gets another injunction thanks to the newcomers.

Plainfield immediately starts exploring the station and he finds the corridor that leads

to the Forbidden Zone.

The zone is protected by a system that calls us anyone who approaches to feel an increasing

level of fear.

Going to the corridor very far and the fear becomes crippling, Plainfield makes it further

than most people do before he passes out.

But just entering the corridor is a potential vapor injunction, so the crew have to get

him out.

And it's claimed who ultimately saves the day.

He has the others tie rope to his leg and then he takes a running leap down the corridor.

He's hit with the full force of the system and it knocks him out, but just before it

does, he manages to latch on to Plainfield and the others pull him out.

But it's not over though because Plainfield does not wake up after that.

In fact, his condition starts to deteriorate and he begins having seizures while he's

unconscious.

And then he's not the only one because others start to experience the similar symptoms.

Using BB Waston, she's actually one of the first to fall into a coma from this.

Hugh performs an MRI on Plainfield and he finds something bizarre, a strange network of

silvery filaments wrapped around the lower part of his brain.

Just as he and Ian and a few others are discussing doing a biopsy on the filaments, Plain interrupts

and tells them he knows what they are.

He expresses surprise that the others don't know, especially Ian, as Plain says that Ian

invented them.

The filaments are called Strathclyde Traces, named for the research college where they

were developed or just the traces for short.

According to Plain, they are an intelligence enhancing system, and Ian, who as I said

is a gifted microbiologist, invented them.

Plain says that everyone has them now, including everyone on the station, but that as prisoners,

theirs have been truncated, they've been reduced back to a more formative state.

Everyone else's are more developed.

The actual functional part of the traces have been removed and only the support structure

remains.

He says the traces are also the reason for the wall in their head, and the moment at

which they were installed is the beginning of the wall.

He also confirms something that the others had already suspected, that they all have a

sort of residual telepathic ability, in that sometimes they can hear stray thoughts from

the others.

That also is an effect of the traces.

Plain is adamant that if they can reconstruct the actual traces, the part that was removed,

their memories will be restored, and they will be able to solve the other problems they

are facing.

Ian insists that he doesn't know any of this, but privately he wonders if it could be

true, because throughout his time on the station, he's been developing nanomachines and

testing them on himself, and he hasn't told anyone about this.

He's been trying to remove the wall.

He thinks that his efforts might be linked to some now hidden knowledge of the traces.

Plain admits to recognizing that from her dreams, remember I said that she was familiar

with the idea because of a saddle, and the traces that they're seeing in people's

brains on the MRI have roughly the shape of a saddle with stirrups.

So that adds some weight to Clayne's story.

Clayne's group did bring one more thing with them, marching orders.

The council has decided to parole none of the prisoners, and Kate, by the way, is one

of them.

There's a scheduled departure time for the next day, when a transport ship will teleport

them from the shunt platform up to the ship, but there's a problem.

One of the parolees has been dead for a long time.

Not going could lead to a vapor injunction.

In the meantime, seven of the other parolees decide to defy the order and stay on the station,

and that includes Kate, by the way, Kate decides to stay as well.

Leaving only one, Stephen Welch, to take the trip.

Ian takes this chance to send out a data tile containing a message for the council.

The council replies with a recorded message of its own, and this is after Welch has left.

They teleport down another tile.

The message on the tile claims that the council is not responsible for the illness plaguing

the station.

In fact, it says that the prisoners are lying about the illness, but at the same time,

it warns them not to try to send out any of the sick via the shunt.

Then it gives them more information on the traces, including a hologram of a fully complete

set, which is much larger and more involved than the ones currently in their heads.

It confirms Clayne's story about their traces being reduced and non-functional, and then

it also warns them that the rest of the parolees must be sent up, 48 hours from now, or it

will be considered their second vapor injunction, the original refusal to go is the first.

So now the group has 48 hours to figure out what's going on and find a way to stop it.

Ian accuses Clayne of being behind the illness, but he doesn't have proof yet.

In the meantime though, he grudgingly accepts Clayne's suggestion to find a way to rebuild

the traces, partly to help with solving their problem, but also to try to get their memories

back.

But things become much more urgent when suddenly they detect a shift in the anchor.

Now I haven't explained to you how the sun station works yet.

The station has several levels.

All of the occupied levels where most of the prisoners live and work are at the top.

At the bottom is the suncup, that's the plasma intake facility where they take in

solar plasma and they fuse it into different elements and alloys.

And then in between is the forbidden zone, that's a couple of levels where they're not

allowed to go and where the fear system is in place and that's where the vapor lives.

The elevators and maintenance tunnels pass through it and those are insulated from the

fear system, but otherwise the rest of it is off limits to the prisoners.

The station is inside the sun's atmosphere, it's actually below the sun's chromosphere

if you recall the structure of the sun's science.

It's protected by a renter shield, an energy field that keeps everything out.

Now, renter shields also have time dilation effects.

So the stronger the field is, the greater this effect will be and what happens is anything

inside the shields envelope experiences time slower than anything on the outside.

So the three years that the prisoners have experienced is equivalent to 10 years on the outside.

At the top of the shield and at the bottom is what is called a monopole corridor.

This is a microscopically thin extension of the shield that runs out past the boundary

of the sun's atmosphere at the top and down toward the core of the sun at the bottom.

All shunt travel goes through the top monopole corridor to a ship parked at the top of it.

So essentially things are turned into energy or atoms, it's not really clear on which

and then transmitted up through the monopole corridor and then reassembled in a ship at

the top or in reverse when things come down the corridor.

Underneath the station inside the shield is the anchor.

Presumably that is another facility, they know that it can be manned, but they really

don't know much about it and they don't have any schematic sport.

It is connected to the station by a half kilometer long tether and this is an actual physical

tether not like a tractor beam.

And then as I said there's an extension of the inner shield around it and then the bottom

monopole corridor extends below that.

But the anchor is off limits just like the forbidden zone, they're not allowed to go there.

Now when the anchor shifts the station feels it like an earthquake.

The crew confirms that it did move and it's immediately obvious why.

Dylan Oaks, the newcomer who was regressed to childhood, had persuaded Matt White, the

pilot trained little boy to play with one of the systems in the suncup and somehow in

doing that they managed to divert almost 90% of the station's processing power, which

not only moved the anchor but also shut down and possibly damaged various other systems.

Now it only moved the anchor 12 feet, but that was plenty, an erratic move could collapse

the shield and destroy the station.

Ian has the engineers reinforce the shields, but the real damage is that the shift through

the monopole corridor out of alignment effectively cutting them off from any shunt capability

and the deadline is less than two days away.

See, when a ship comes to the top of the corridor, it comes to very precise coordinates so that

the corridor will line up with it that way it can receive.

So if the corridor is off direction by just even a portion of a degree, it'll miss the

ship and nothing can reform.

And they need the corridor active within two days.

By the way, here's a funny anecdote.

Let me step out of the story for a second to tell you this.

This book was written in the 1990s and in the original edition, there's this panicky scene

where Kate asks how much memory was diverted in the computer.

And the engineer very alarmed says it was, I believe, 80 gigabytes, may have said 60,

but 60 or 80 gigabytes.

Now remember, that's supposed to be about 90% of its capacity.

In 2005, when I read this, I didn't particularly blink at that, but in 2026, that sounds practically

microscopic.

But then I purchased an ebook copy and to amend what I said at the beginning, the book

is available in ebook form, so you can get it that way if you want to read it.

I purchased an ebook copy for ease of searching and I noticed that it's actually been updated

in that edition.

The most recent edition says that 800 terabytes were diverted, which I don't know for a futuristic

space station still seems a little small to me when we're talking about the master computer

for the entire station, but what do I know, at least I try it.

The other major effect of the voice tampering is that now the software running the Sally,

the food processor, is almost completely erased.

And the backup files are stored locally in the forbidden zone.

In muses to himself that the system assembly won't have to kill them.

They're going to end up doing it themselves.

Meanwhile, the illness is still spreading and the victims are falling into comas.

The comas are exactly like a coma that the crew has seen before.

One of their crew members, in fact, one of their leaders, his name was Lyell McKenzie about

a year before this fell into a coma and died and the symptoms looked very similar to

what we're seeing here.

And so with that in mind, and knowing what might happen, the engineers, the fiddlers,

are building stasis chambers.

Now, renter shields aren't only large scale.

They can be small scale too.

And so these chambers are hospital beds with like a capsule shell and a built-in renter

field designed to slow time for the occupant and keep them alive until a solution can be found.

But this gives Ian an idea and he gives the fiddlers some new instructions.

What exactly he tells them will get to that in a minute.

While they are working, he comes up with a plan to try to get the backup software down

in the forbidden zone.

Now Kate is obviously alarmed by this because they already have one vapor injunction.

And then Ian remastered that really, they already have two.

Plainfield's excursion into the zone was their first.

And they know this because that's one of the rules you can't go in there.

But the council seemed to be unaware of that, even though they should have known because

that information went up the monopole cord or along with Welch when he left.

And the councilmembers had said that the paroleese refusal to leave was the first injunction.

So this is caused Ian now to begin to suspect that although the vapor is definitely real,

I mean after all Ian has seen him, the injunctions might not be.

The system might be working on the basis of the crew's fear of punishment.

And he shares this with Kate and Hugh but he warns them to keep it to themselves.

If they can find a way to defeat the fear-inducing system, they can get down there and he has an

idea for how to do that as well.

He suggests finding out what the traces are made of because he thinks that it's the presence

of the traces that is making the fear system work.

And so he thinks if they can create a metal alloy paint with the same composition as the

traces, they can spray it over environmental suits and use it as like an insulation against

the fear system.

Walkright passed it and into the forbidden zone.

I mean, they can already produce everything they need for this using the sun cup.

Now while that is being done, Ian disappears into his lab and we won't see him for a while.

Things continue to deteriorate.

Kate finds herself waking up from asleep that she can't remember on the floor of the sun

cup control room.

Her dreams have changed.

Now in her dreams, the traces are larger and they flood her with images of taking root

like a tree.

She wakes up to find a silver dust like glitter all over the room, including covering

her and her assistant.

Her assistant is asleep and covered in the dust as well.

She manages to alert the engineers about what's going on, but then she passes out again.

The chief engineer, Elliott Schumacher, finds Hugh Blightstone and tells him what happened.

They look for Ian in his lab and they find a large black cylindrical machine.

It opens and Ian steps out and they realize that this machine is also a stasis chamber,

but it's a chamber in reverse.

The field has been reversed so that time passes faster on the inside.

Now they don't know how long he's been inside from his perspective, but it's been several

days at least because normally Ian is clean-shaven and now he has a beard.

So he comes out and gives them aerosol cans which let out a mist that they immediately

inhale.

He sends the other fiddlers around the station with the cans to spread something around

in the air and he refuses to tell anyone what's in the containers.

But privately to Hugh and Elliott he calls it life insurance.

Down in the infirmary, Ian gathers his people and he tells them that the illness is very

contagious.

The cylinders will help with that, but in the meantime they still need to take more urgent

action before everyone ends up in a coma.

So he sends two staff to lock themselves into the sun cup and keep it running.

Then he sends another prisoner, Kristen Barron, to the Sally, the food processor to install

new codes that will mass produce the substance in the aerosol cans.

Then he shows Hugh and the others what he's found.

He shows them how the traces interweave with the brain and he says he has a theory about

what they actually do, but he wants Hugh to run some tests and confirm it.

He also calls for the remaining newcomers, remember Plainfield is now dead from the illness.

To be confined in the infirmary, but Dylan Oaks has gone exploring and he can't be found.

They determined that he went outside the station.

There is a bubble of atmosphere trapped inside the shield and around the station so that's

definitely possible.

They speculate that he might be trying to enter the forbidden zone from outside, but they

can't be sure.

Claim argues again that they need to regrow their traces in order to solve all of these

problems, but Ian shoots down the idea and says they don't have time.

With the station's computer operating at maximum capacity now just to try to realign the

monopole corridor, it's only a matter of time until the shield fails and they all die.

Meaning that has to be the priority and toward that goal, Pablo Ramirez arrives with

the painted environment suits, including one for Claim because Ian insists that he

go along.

Ian leads a team into the forbidden zone consisting of Claim, Ramirez and two of Ramirez's

fiddlers.

Twin sisters named Arlene and Pauline Dyerberg.

Inside they find dusty, unused corridors and doors and emergency lights.

Ian tells them they need to find the source of the fear field and disarm it and they do

but it turns out to be not one large source, but many small ones, strange, fibrous orbs

that generate an energy field that causes the fear reaction.

The fiddler spray it with more of the silver alloy and when they do, the field stops.

So as I searched the zone, they continue to find and spray these orbs.

And as they go, Ian realizes that his memories are starting to return and he admits finally

that the aerosol canisters contain a kind of airborne nanobot that he is developed, which

break down the remaining traces in their heads and purge their brains up, starts to restore

their memories.

It's for this reason that he sequestered himself into the stasis chamber to give himself

time to design and prepare the nanobots.

And now the others will start to recover themselves as well.

This is what also was on the data tile that was sent with Kristen Barron to plug into the

sally to help it mass produce these nanobots.

Finally, they find the station's flight deck and there they find the dead remains of

the vapor and they realize that it doesn't look fully robotic.

It almost looks like a human, modified, covered in the silver dust.

Claim becomes nauseated at the site and he leaves the room.

Hugh contacts Ian and says that he received what he believes to be a sort of telepathic

message from Kate, remember they've got latent telepathy as one of their abilities.

And she warns Hugh that the traces will take them over completely if they aren't stopped.

Ian tells him to continue mass producing the nanobots and releasing them into the air.

Things start happening very fast now.

As members of the crew start to recover their memories, they gain the ability to use

the flight deck's controls and so Ian summons matte white down to the pilot's console.

The direbergs figure out how to reset the monopole cord or the station's stabilizers

that they do that.

But then they discover that the anchor is rising along its tether approaching the station.

Now, the computer is still at capacity, but Hutchings realizes that the anchor must be

being controlled manually and there's only one person that it could be, Dylan Oaks,

who has apparently not been regressed to a child as they thought and who has apparently

climbed down the tether to the anchor itself.

Now the anchor is rising, and as it does, the sun station itself also rises up along

the monopole cord or Ian tells Ramirez that the system assembly

planted Oaks on the station to bring it back to them as a backup planned if they couldn't

get what they needed by way of the shunt.

But he keeps the matter of why that would be to himself.

While the others prepare to move the station, Ian goes into the final room in the forbidden

zone.

This room used to be a laboratory of some kind, but now it is filled with strange silver

structures that look like slender trees.

Twelve of them occupy this space and they remind him of white birch trees with the leaves

missing.

At the far end, he finds a monitor with a message waiting.

He opens the message and sees his own face come up on the screen.

And now we find out the full truth of what's really happened.

This message that Ian recorded before the wall went up in his head is for the sun station's

original crew from before it was turned into a prison.

Past Ian tells them that the traces are an alien life form, partly organic, partly artificial,

entirely metallic.

They're like a form of von Neumann machines, self-reproducing nano machines that spread

themselves to every civilization they come into contact with.

They came into our solar system on a comet, which in hindsight was probably a ship of

some sort.

And when they interacted, excuse me, and when they encountered humans, both on Earth and

in the colonies of the solar system, they infected them and began to take over.

So Ian, along with Lyle McKenzie, who passed away, was the co-leader of a team of soldiers

and scientists deployed to find a way to fight back and destroy the traces.

And he succeeded, mostly.

The traces can spread in the form of the silver dust that's all over the forbidden zone,

but they can't reproduce until they fully established themselves in the host's brain,

speed on the body, and then mature and flower.

That's what the trees in the room are.

Not quite the final form, but the almost mature form.

The flowering version of the traces, except that they can't actually flower.

It's in this form that they reproduce, and then they continue their slow conquest of

the cosmos.

So along the way, Ian had invented a kind of nano machine that restricts the growth of

the traces.

It stops them when they're at this almost mature form and prevents them from flowering.

Now for most of humanity, that meant they were still effectively dead because the traces

had already grown in their brains and taken full control of them and taken over their

bodies.

Ian's team were still uninfected at the time, and he wrongly assumed that the staff on

the sun station were also uninfected because the station is so hard to reach.

So he sends down this message along with the schematics for the nanobots so that they

could protect themselves.

But the station crew were already infected, and Ian was not aware of that.

By the time Ian's team arrives, they had also been infected as well, though they also

didn't know it yet.

But the nanobots stopped the traces from growing in their brains and left them with just

these initial support structures that they saw in the MRI.

This initial framework of filaments.

And that was enough to create the wall in their memories.

Now this is the crisis for the traces, of course.

Elsewhere, Kate is dreaming under the effect of the traces, and she realizes that if they

can't flower, they can't mature and they can't reproduce, and they will eventually

wither and die.

And that's what's happened in the control room with these 12 structures, which are the

original station crew.

They matured as far as they could, but they can't flower, they can't reproduce, and now

they have aged and died.

Now it's been 10 years on the outside, and most of the traces in the solar system surely

must be at that point as well.

The end is approaching for them, and they are becoming more desperate, and so they've

come back to force Ian and his team to undo the damage, and to give them away to flower

again.

And they won't do it on site, excuse me, and if they won't do it on site, then claim

of the other new arrivals, who are, of course, under the control of the traces, will bring

the station to them.

But without knowing any of this, Ian has done what shouldn't be possible.

He's completed the job.

His newest and Autobots don't just restrict the traces, they destroy them.

And now he is a threat that cannot be condoned, and this is immediately obvious when one

of the silver trees attacks him.

Yes, I said they were dead, but hold that thought.

In the meantime, out in the station, Hugh Bladestone has also figured it all out, but

he is dealing with a crisis.

Rhonda Berry, one of the newcomers, has an advanced case of the infection, and Hugh and

the Fiddlers had not yet managed to finish the stasis chamber that would slow down time

for her.

So before they can give her the antidote, the nanobots, unexpectedly she rapidly transforms

into the early stage of one of the silver trees.

This is a sort of warrior phase of the traces lifestyle, like a late juvenile stage.

It's a mobile microorganism that can fight and defend the others.

He locks her in the infirmary and seals the events.

But this makes him realize that he has to dispense the antidote, the nanobots, to everyone

as fast as possible before this happens to anyone else.

But there's a problem.

He discovers that Kristen Barron has been assaulted, and she never made it to the Sally to

mass produce the aerosol solution, which of course, consists of the nanobots.

Lorraine Berry, the head of security, picks up the story here.

At Ian's instructions, she is guarding the shunt platform, and for good cause, as one

of the silvery warrior forms approaches carrying the data tile with the codes, which it stole

from Kristen Barron.

It wants to get off the station with those codes, because at this point Ian has convinced

the traces that what he's actually producing is the cure that they are looking for, to

allow them to flower again.

Ian manages to destroy the creature, but in the process, it wounds and possibly infects

her, and she also destroys the shunt platform.

So now, no one can leave the station.

The creature that attacked Ian, of course, is Clayne, who is fully transformed now, and

he's making a final attempt to get a solution from Ian.

He is the only living trace in the room, as I said the others, the former crew, are all

dead.

Ian fights him off and escapes back to the flight deck, where he finds Ramirez holding

a dart that Clayne fired at him on his way down.

Pablo was hit with the dart and has been infected, but Ian tells him not to worry because the

cure will be circulating soon.

He tells Ramirez and White to get the station ready to fly, but not to take off yet.

He returns to the infirmary, and he meets with Hugh, who updates him on the situation, and

then reveals that the tile that Hugh sent up with Kristen was a fake, just in case it was

stolen.

Hugh still has the real codes, and he has put them to use.

He's replicating the cure.

Ian explains that the warrior forms that they're seeing now are like a late juvenile stage,

as I said.

The trees are, well, he calls it a mature stage, but they're not quite mature.

They can't flower.

They're unable to reproduce.

He sends Hugh to check on Lorraine, who is not responding, and by the way, she's going

to be fine.

We'll go ahead and say that.

Then he checks in with the flight deck and confirms that the anchor and thus the station

still rising, but slowly.

While all of this is happening, Clayne escapes through the maintenance tunnels.

Ian has the flight deck seal all of the exits to the tunnels to route him to the station's

gym, and he goes to meet him there.

There's a group of little boys in there at the time, and he rescues them.

They have not yet got their memories back.

Then he faces off with Clayne, or the thing that used to be Clayne.

But Ian has an advantage here.

The gravity in the gym is variable.

Ian has plates in the floor that varies the gravity.

It can go all the way from zero gravity up to several times Earth normal.

The creature nearly captures and re-infects Ian, but Ian has the boys turn the gravity

up to six G's and then up to eight.

Ian has been working out in this gym for three years at various gravities wearing heavy

golden shackles.

This is not a problem for him.

He can handle it for a minute or two, but the creature is crushed like a bug and finally

killed.

Finally, the station rises up into the sun's chromosphere where the temperatures are dangerously

high.

Finally the crew gets their first look at the anchor, which proves to be the alien ship

that was the heart of the comet that brought the traces to the solar system.

And they receive a signal from a ship in the monopole cord or above them, waiting for

a shunt transport.

But it's not just one signal.

It's two.

There's a second ship waiting.

And Ian finally reveals the last piece of the puzzle.

For three years, the crew has been operating the suncup, mining and fusing metals from

the sun's plasma.

Those metals have been shunted up to a cargo ship and carried away.

Ian estimates by now that they've sent enough material to build an entire fleet of battleships,

and that's what's waiting for them, an entire fleet under the control of the traces.

And more and more signals start to arrive confirming this.

Either by way of the shunt or by oaks returning to the station to them, the traces are going

to get what they want, which is Ian and the solution that they think that he's carrying.

Everyone else, by the way, they want them as well, not for what they can provide in

the way of the solution, but because they're looking for more food.

This is more bodies for the traces to take over and devour.

But it's a newly recovered cape that gives them the solution.

In the suncup, there are 20 tons of solar plasma, and the suncup still has a working

shunt platform.

All it takes is a few hundred pounds, teleported up to a ship, and this receiving ship will

detonate like a bomb.

And by now, the traces are so desperate, so sure that this is their only chance that

as each ship is destroyed, the others just fall in line.

By the time it's over, 31 ships appear in the monofilk board or one after another, and

31 ships are destroyed.

It takes 22 minutes to destroy them all.

But the station is not quite out of the woods or rather out of the fire.

There's one last thing to be done, and it's up to the engineers.

Arlene Dyerberg steps up, and he disengages the tether that connects them to the anchor.

Suddenly detached, it drops into the lower segment of the monopole corridor and it's

crushed to atoms.

And 30 million miles later, the station is free and headed home to Earth.

In the epilogue, Ian walks in the pasture of his family's farm on Earth.

We learned that the survivors of Sun Station Ra are not the only ones.

There's about half a billion humans left in the solar system, mostly in the colonies.

It's enough to rebuild though it won't be easy.

Ian is certain by now that there were humans that collaborated with the traces or the

Cory Axie as he now remembers that they called themselves.

But it wasn't enough, and without the ability to fully mature and flower, the remaining

Cory Axie throughout the system have all died.

There's silvery corpses dot the landscape everywhere.

But enough of humanity is technologies and its civilization have survived and civilization

will recover, or as Ian puts it, humanity has survived, but just barely.

And yet he thinks things will rebound quickly.

After all, with their own minds and bodies restored to normal, the crew of Ra have already

started to recover.

Several of them have started relationships and some are pregnant, including Kate, whose

long relationship with Ian they can now both remember.

And with that, the survivors turned their attention to reuniting the scattered remnants

of humanity and to rebuilding.

I find this story especially fascinating because as a post-apocalyptic story, it relies on

a trope that I don't think gets used enough and it's a trope that I mentioned at the beginning

of our episode.

The idea that the world has ended, but the survivors don't even know it.

Or at least not at first.

For another example, you could think of the Matrix, where Neo doesn't know anything about

the apocalypse until Morpheus rescues him from the Matrix.

Throughout most of Fortress on the Sun, our characters have no idea that the world has

ended.

You would easily believe that the novel is just a science fiction mystery because, well,

it is.

But lurking under that surface is a terrifying apocalypse and our characters have no clue.

And the knife gets twisted even more when we learn that they did know, but they effectively

lost the war and their enemies hid the truth from them.

Now, I'll admit that the execution of this story relies heavily on having one character

who is essentially superhuman.

Ian Hutchings is, well, he's definitely something else.

He's very much a renaissance man with a whole collection of abilities, talents, and interests.

If anyone listening is familiar with the Golden Age pulp character, Doc Savage, and by the

way, if you aren't familiar with him, please go look him up and find some of his stories.

They're a lot of fun.

Ian is very reminiscent of Doc Savage.

He's larger than life, both in physical size and in personality.

He wears these massive 20-pound golden shackles on each arm as a self-punishment for the

crimes that he believes he committed.

He works out in increasingly higher levels of gravity so that he's ridiculously strong.

And he's a genius, an expert in microbiology and biotechnology, but more than just being

a genius in his chosen fields, he's a clever, quick-thinking, hyper-logical, multi-talented

thinker and leader.

He single-handedly came up with half the solution to the problem before he lost his memories,

then reconstructed it afterward without knowing what he was fighting, and then put the rest

together in the space of about five days, that's the time he spent inside the reverse

stasis chamber.

I can't think of a better way to describe him than superhuman.

On the topic of how he put this plan together, I was heavily reminded of a movie called

Push.

And if you haven't seen this movie several years ago now, it stars Chris Evans and Dakota

fanning from before they, excuse me, before Chris Evans was Captain America.

This is one of his earlier movies.

And in this movie, everyone has not everyone, but a lot of people have superpowers of one

sort or another.

You reach a point in the movie where, because some people have telepathic abilities, they

need to carry out a certain plan.

And Chris Evans' character formulates this plan, but it has to be done in a way that he

cannot know what the plan is.

Because if he knows, then it'll be detected, you know, someone will read his mind, and

it'll be detected, and the plan will fail.

And the way that he does that, the way that he ensures that the plan is carried out even

though he himself has to have the memories removed from his head.

It's very similar to what happens here in Fortress on the Sun.

Anyway, I love that movie.

If you haven't seen it, you should go watch it.

And I don't get it in your head that it's like any other superhero movie because it's

really not.

Anyway, definitely worth checking out.

So just a little plug for that.

Anyway, all of this, it's not so bad, really.

There's a reason stories like Doc Savage, or even you could compare someone like Batman

for another example, resonate with people as much as they do.

We look at these characters, and they give us something to aspire to.

Something that, in theory, anyone could be.

Something that doesn't require superpowers, just a lot of dedication and a quick mind.

Now even with such a focus on Ian, the other characters are not neglected.

They are, excuse me, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 named characters in

this book.

But all of them get some character development.

Some of them, like Hugh Blades' Stone and Kate DeWitt, and do some playing get quite a

lot.

But it can sometimes feel abrupt as though things are being thrown at you too quickly.

But I realized why that is.

It's because new characters are introduced through the eyes of the existing characters.

When a new character shows up, they immediately start interacting with the story and the other

characters without any background being given because the existing characters already

know them and aren't thinking about their background.

Now inevitably though, the story will go back and fill in the gaps.

But in every introduction, we hit the ground running.

I don't know if I think that's a good idea or not, but I did think it was at least novel.

And there is a lot of detail to be had in this book, even though it's fairly short.

I know my summary was long, but I left out a lot of the interesting details.

For instance, I didn't give you much at all about the unfolding backstory of the crew,

where they were a military response force, half composed of soldiers and half of conscripted

scientists, sent to intervene in the crisis presented by the traces.

I didn't talk about their ship, the John E. Baldry, that many of them see in their dreams.

I didn't tell you how the Koryaxi came to be called the Strathclyde Traces.

The word Traces is a word for the saddle and harness on a horse, like I said.

And the undeveloped traces in the brain are vaguely saddle shaped.

Strathclyde isn't named for the college where the traces were developed, as Claim says.

It's named for the first space colony that gets conquered by the traces.

I didn't tell you about the Bindelstiffs, the crew members who are under the effects

of a kind of narcolepsy that makes them sleep wherever they are for days at a time.

And so on and so forth.

The details come at you fast, but they do make this world feel alive and urgent.

I chose this book for the podcast partly because I was delighted to see that it fits

our format, but also because it fills a gap in our coverage and I'm not talking about

the schedule here.

One of the type of apocalypse that we cover is the alien invasion, but the only example

of it we've ever had so far is roadside picnic, which is not really an apocalypse anyway.

At the time I described it as like a near miss apocalypse.

Fortress on the Sun fills that gap.

And it's doubly interesting because these are not your traditional aliens.

They're not coming in with ships and ray guns and green skin.

They're dust that gets inside you and makes you into something else.

And that kind of thing has been done before, but there's always room for a new take on

it.

Or, you know, a 30 year old take on it.

Let's not split hairs.

It's new to most everyone here.

Anyway, I love this book.

I love this book so much that I actually reached out to the author and asked him for any

comments he'd like to have included in the episode.

Any light he can shed on its writing and what he wanted to get across.

He has a number of other books which I've not read though I want to look into them.

When I first read it 20 years ago, first of all, there were less of them and I didn't

have a good way to locate them.

Anyway, no answer as of the time of this writing.

So Paul, if you're out there and you somehow hear this episode, check your email and drop

me a line.

I would gladly go back and edit this recording to include anything you'd like us to say.

And in the meantime, everyone else, go check out Fortress on the Sun.

It's a great, fast paced, exciting read and I promise you I have not done it justice

even after rambling on about it for 45 minutes.

If you can't find it in print, like I said, you can find the ebook and I should mention

that there has been an update made to the text at some point.

We know this because of the passage about the 800 terabytes.

So someone is keeping this book alive.

I don't believe there is an audio book or at least I couldn't find one, unfortunately,

but anyway, if you can, check it out.

Next time, rather than pick up Fallout New Vegas next week, we're going to move it to later

in the season.

It needs some space after Fallout 3, I think, anyway.

Instead we will resume our original schedule and we'll take a look at our first television

series of the season.

And this, I might add, is the story that really started it all for me.

It is, as far as my memory goes, the first post-apocalyptic story I ever encountered.

We will be watching the 1980 Hannah Barbarra animated series Thundar the Barbarian.

Join us there at the end of the world.

The post-apocalyptic podcast is hosted on Podbean and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

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Links can be found in the notes for this episode.