The latest tool in this arsenal is ultrasound: less invasive than electromagnetics, more precise than charismatic revival, it can be used to boot up brain activity [39] without any of those pesky electrodes or magnetic hairnets. In Blindsight it serves as a convenient back door to explain why Rorschach's hallucinations persist even in the presence of Faraday shielding— but in the here and now, Sony has been renewing an annual patent for a machine which uses ultrasonics to implant "sensory experiences" directly into the brain [40]. They're calling it an entertainment device with massive applications for online gaming. Uh huh. And if you can implant sights and sounds into someone's head from a distance, why not implant political beliefs and the irresistable desire for a certain brand of beer while you're at it?
The «telematter» drive that gets our characters to the story is based on teleportation studies reported in Nature [41], Science, [42, 43]Physical Review Letters [44], and (more recently) everyone and their dog, e.g., [45]. The idea of transmitting antimatter specs as a fuel template is, so far as I know, all mine. To derive plausible guesses for Theseus's fuel mass, accelleration, and travel time I resorted to The Relativistic Rocket [46], maintained by the mathematical physicist John Baez at UC Riverside. Theseus use of magnetic fields as radiation shielding is based on research out of MIT [47]. I parked the (solar powered) Icarus Array right next to the sun because the production of antimatter is likely to remain an extremely energy-expensive process for the near future [48, 49].
The undead state in which Theseus carries her crew is, of course, another iteration of the venerable suspended animation riff (although I'd like to think I've broken new ground by invoking vampire physiology as the mechanism). Two recent studies have put the prospect of induced hibernation closer to realization. Blackstone et al. have induced hibernation in mice by the astonishingly-simple expedient of exposing them to hydrogen sulfide [50]; this gums up their cellular machinery enough to reduce metabolism by 90 %. More dramatically (and invasively), researchers at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh claim [51] to have resurrected a dog three hours after clinical death, via a technique in which the animal's blood supply was replaced by an ice-cold saline solution [52]. Of these techniques, the first is probably closer to what I envisioned, although I'd finished the first draft before either headline broke. I considered rejigging my crypt scenes to include mention of hydrogen sulfide, but ultimately decided that fart jokes would have ruined the mood.
Blindsight describes Big Ben as an "Oasa Emitter". Officially there's no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters [53, 54] — dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common [55, 56]— ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa's emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist [57]).
Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants [58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64] and/or brown dwarves [65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75], scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach's ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick [76]. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field [77].
Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 200 °Cr105, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system [78].
Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an «alien» that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.
Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge— and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you've-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler's distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction— the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk— takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but…
Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He's right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own "mirror neurons" fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action [79]; this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness [80, 81, 82].
Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it's more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn slow for advanced multicellularity [83]. Cunningham's proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.
The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it's not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature [84]; heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152 orders of magnitude[85].
And how's this for alien: no genes. The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin's little-known treatise [86](damn but I've always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life [87, 88]. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components [89, 90, 91, 92]. Of course, you still need something to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that's where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in Rorschach's environment anyway.