Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (2015)

Some of us are born and are told that endless possibilities for our lives await us. Others are born knowing more about their own story than the possibilities. Both can be a blessing. Both can also be a curse. But it is the former that is more a curse, especially if one's own story is obscured or unknown to start. Alastair Reynolds' novella Slow Bullets tells a story of why nothing, none of our stories, our lives, should be taken for granted. All of the characters in Slow Bullets are at risk of their conscious lives being ripped from them, a "slow bullet" one method by which the devastation occurs.

Scur, the headstrong main character of Slow Bullets, is left with her memories. By the time Slow Bullets begins, there is one memory that she recalls as story - her mother reading her a book of censored poetry during the war of the Central Worlds. The rest of her memories are recollections of her past life, fleeting moments with her parents and her sister; deep impressions of their personalities and characteristics. However fragmented these memories are, they stick with her. And after the ceasefire from the world she once knew, they are still with her as she wakes up (possibly centuries later) aboard a spaceship named the Caprice. Scur, a conscripted soldier among other soldiers, a crew, and civilians, find themselves on this spaceship, all seemingly convicted of a war crime they each may or may not be guilty of.

Dominating the knowledge of her own story (by memory) is the event that might have led to her presence on the ship. An actual war criminal - Orvin - and his gang stripped her of all belongings as she tried to escape the war-torn world where she and her family found themselves. The war criminal's, in this case, Orvin's, weapon is the slow bullet: a bullet that contains potentialities of life through other memories injected into its' chosen victim. Once the bullet enters the body, it must find the heart, and either decimates the victim by explosion or the person is saved by their own will to life.

"I took the knife and began to cut the bullet out of me... after I pushed the knife into myself there was an interval of darkness, and then I woke somewhere. It was cold and there was no light... I made out the trace of the wound where the bullet had gone in and the place where I had cut it out. Or at least had begun to cut it out - I could not be sure I had succeeded in my own efforts." (p. 20-23)

What's left for each victim of a slow bullet is of a profound, and no longer simple, necessity; an admittance of the transfigured life of the mind, permeating throughout a person's physical form, an affirmation of one's own actions, and a reification of the truth of one's life, identity, and history.

A contested, prominent artifact mentioned throughout Reynolds' novella is "The Book". Whether or not Scur (or others) believe in the Book is part of the catalysts for violent outbreaks, such as the one Scur was subjected to by Orvin, who claims he follows another Book like The Book, though one not read through interpretation. No one aboard the ship really knows the Book by reading, even as believers, and in the end the Book itself is something put away - after charged for being "divisive" - in exchange for other stories, in an almost sacrificial way. Some of those stories are hidden in each person's slow bullet, still others are written and recorded from the accessing and comprehending the present existence of life on the ship and of the ship itself.

"You know of the wakening. You either lived through it or you read of it in the other mandatory texts. But we had no name for it then. It was a thing that happened to us in ones and twos, rather than a collective experience. And to begin with, none of us had the faintest idea where we were or what had happened." (p. 20-21)

As Scur wakens on the Caprice (her last memory that of Orvin's attack) she notices all the other inhabitants in hibernation "eggs", each labeled with essential information and data noting origin, rank, and name.

The disorienting difference between Scur's memories of her past and the present is the spaceship itself: a material signal of industry and labor from an unknown government entity. After observing her surroundings, the spaceship appears to be institutional laboratory complete with rations of food and other supplies, including weapons. Almost everyone has standard issue clothing. They all wear silver. She meets one inhabitant named Prad, a technician, the first person she speaks to directly. To him, everyone aboard the ship, including himself and Scur, are "dregs".

Immediately it is clear to Scur that work should be done, that an announcement should be made to the everyone aboard the ship. She works almost automatically, going through each motion with immediacy, without any preconceived notions of plot or scheme, acting on impulse and rationality alone, reasserting value and an affirmation of life when and where she can. Scur works towards liberation and justice by creating an atmosphere that allows for the most self-expression and by finding ways to temper those who cross the line.

As Slow Bullets unfolds, the truth of what's happening to the Caprice, like the fact that the ship is severely damaged and breaking down, becomes as vital as individual self-consciousness itself. Recognizing the fallibility of the spaceship itself, including an impairment that disables it from receiving pulsar signals from any distance, is one of the first priorities for all who've awakened. The pulsars that are still read are increasingly faint. These faults and failures of the ship's internal system begin to reflect the what's happening to the people onboard, and by the end they are scrambling, yet still determined to save the ship's system by recording, through writing, their own memories and the ship's internal stories.

She learns from Prad that the Caprice has been in motion for a century or more and is no longer connected to any known signals in space. After announcing this, they work together using the resources already available on the ship to discover the knowns and unknowns about their predicament, surviving on the rations while salvaging the goods that remain on the ship. They find out that Orvin himself is aboard the ship.

"It was not illness, though. I had seen people in the war look this way when they had witnessed something that no decent person should ever have to see. It was usually the realization that we are just fragile bags of meat and bone and blood, held together by almost nothing. With Prad it was a different sort of realisation, but no less discomforting... all Prad could say was that he was sorry, over and over again." (p. 57)

Most of the people aboard have slow bullets lodged inside their bodies. Scur, Prad and their newfound team begin to decipher every person's bullet as well as bullets "extracted from dead sleepers" to be rewritten with other important stories from the past. All are recorded on the ship's metal walls and through individual "slates". People's hands grow tired from inscribing all these words on the walls and by creating space from their past bullets for carrying new stories. Scur gives up her own memories for the works of the censored poet her mother read to her as a child; her memories, then, live on in her body, no longer within her bullet of time.

"'If each of us values the total sum of knowledge,' I said, 'then each of us will have no choice but to work together to safeguard the entire population of the ship. We have to help each other to live. We haven't time for anything else. We haven't time for hate or bitterness or recrimination or vengeance. All our old lives ended when the skip went wrong. All our new lives began with the wakening." (p. 157)

Once Orvin is found and captured on the ship, Scur makes a decision to free him not by death but by his own slow bullet. He is released not on the Caprice but on another planet far below them, where he is given the chance to find his own will to life against forces of nature that still had not and have not yet ceased to exist.