Forever Curious, Part 12
Chapter 4: A Sea of Hyperwaves
Not that Na-Yeli has come at rest underwater. However, since there are no scrambled-to-the-point-of-white-noise electromagnetic fields in here—like in the fractal maze—her compass and dead positioning (another function of the dead reckoning software) equipment have a fairly good estimate of her position in this third layer. She’s been dragged around quite a bit, albeit at a much lower speed than above. Her equipment kept track, and as she is now moving with, what she calls, the undertow, she can extrapolate a rough overview of the underwater flow patterns.
While the mega storm and the hyperwaves rotate clockwise—in the same direction as the Enigmatic Objects fast-rotating electromagnetic field—the undertow acts as under a series of cells. Just below the surface these cells—Na-Yeli wanted to name them ‘supersonic cells’, but the water movement speed is well below the sound barrier—follow the clockwise rotation, but at the break of each wave their flow goes to the bottom, then turns back to a counter-clockwise movement before going up again. Hence these cells all have clockwise flow, as well. Yet the undertow beneath the cells has a counter-clockwise rotation.
The undertow is about two kilometers deep, much too deep for any of the chemiluminescence at the surface to shine through. It’s pitch dark. Fortunately, the crazy flows seem to disperse the closer she gets to the bottom, and by tacking a bit against the stream, she uses the force of the flow to get deeper. She’s still north of the equator, making counter-clockwise loops that take about two hours to traverse a full circle.
Going deeper, the power of the stream gradually disperses, until—at about eight kilometers deep, three kilometers from the bottom—she can finally swim, so that she can go in a direction she wants to. The shortest way to the Diaphragm Gate at the South Pole—which, she has to assume, will be strong enough to prevent the sea from emptying itself into the next layer—is about thirty kilometers. At a brisk pace of one hundred meters per minute, that’s still five hours away, supposing she can keep going that long, which she probably can’t. Neither does she want to arrive there completely spent. There has to be a better way.
First, she extends her exoskin with two circular fins containing a grid of superconducting wires. The absorbed energy can be used for charging her batteries and—aha—propulsion. She considers producing a makeshift propeller, but the problems of making a shaft seal at this immense depth are well-nigh insurmountable. Instead, she chooses a more natural way of propulsion—the whale tail. Her legs aren’t suitable for that, so her exoskin slowly, carefully—the pressure at this depth is immense—extends until it has a working mechanism, driven by a makeshift electromotor.
After some trials, luckily without fatal errors, she manages to get the whale tail going at a steady speed, propelling her with twice the speed she would normally swim. About two-and-a-half hours to go, she thinks, if all goes well.
As it is, Na-Yeli doesn’t go as fast as she would like. At full speed, the makeshift whale-tail propulsion consumes more energy than her absorbing fins extract, and she doesn’t want to arrive at the opening with almost depleted batteries. Enlarging her charging fins is also not an option, as they will then greatly increase her resistance, and cause the whale tail to use even more energy. After an hour of trial-and-error, the size of her charging fins and the motion of her whale tail have been optimized. The only way to arrive with fully charged batteries is simply to move a bit slower.
She doesn’t mind, as it gives her time to recover after the utter madness—and unparalleled awesomeness—above the surface. She already prepares a plan for the reverse journey, if she comes back and if that immense equilibrium state still exists at that time. It’s darker than outer space—no stars in this underwater environment—and much colder than at the surface. The latter doesn’t bother her, as the insulating qualities of her exoskin are near perfect.
As her battery’s energy levels increase, she considers setting up a big searchlight upfront but thinks better of it. Both her sonar and radar notice nothing for several hundred meters around, so she’d only be illuminating empty water, or worse, advertise her presence to potential predators. Nah, she thinks of the latter, they’d all be blind, anyway.
Nothing much happens for a few hours. While all seems quiet, Na-Yeli can’t suppress the feeling that she’s either being followed, or observed, or both. She’s now within fifteen kilometers of the South Polar gate, according to her instruments’ best estimate, and is trying to figure out possible problems with the transition. The pressure at the very bottom of this layered sea is about one-hundred-and-twenty bar. If the pressure at the other end is one bar, or lower, then several highly unpleasant—to say the least—phenomena might occur.
For one, her exoskin—now perfectly withstanding the immense pressure—will expand quite a bit. More than enough to make get her stuck within the one-meter opening (if it’s the same size as the previous ones). Even worse, there might be shock waves erupting from the compressed part of her to the uncompressed part as she moves through the opening, squashing her feet while exploding her head. More than sixty times the reverse of what happened when she entered the two-bar atmosphere at the top.
She sees no easy solutions. She may have to set up an underwater enclosure around the opening—a fortified dome, a kind of underwater igloo—then lower the pressure in the dome, and then go through. But where does she get the materials for such dome, and then support it? The barrier will spaghettify its foundation! There are dissolved metals and minerals in this sea, but filtering them out will take ages.
So while she’d like to get to the South Pole’s Diaphragm Gate via the most direct route, she needs to do some reconnoitering. Typical, she thinks, I’m prepared to meet all kinds of aliens and all types of challenges, and then overcoming the pressure difference at the bottom of an inner ocean might be the most formidable obstacle yet. But she’s not about to give up, far from it. She’s only in the third layer, dog knows how many more to go, let alone going back out. In the long view, she’s barely started.
Therefore, she changes her route: instead of swimming for the South Pole in a straight line, now she follows—as far as the often hyper-fast undercurrents allow her—in a large spiral with a two-hundred-meter diameter, hoping to find something, anything that can be used as dome material.
About two hours later, she’s rewarded for her new strategy, which includes moving away from the calmest parts of this turbulent ocean, as it’s in the fast-moving undertow that she finds echoes of life. Very faint ones, at first, as her sonar—her radar’s microwaves are too easily absorbed underwater, and her lidar has a limited reach for the same reason—only barely detected them.
Yet Na-Yeli is willing to follow even the vaguest of hints and hits jackpot as she moves towards the indistinct sonar reflections. It’s far from easy, as the life forms she eventually discovers move against the fierce undercurrent, and it takes quite some power and effort to get close to them. But it’s definitely worth it.
Screw-Worms, is the first thing that comes to Na-Yeli’s mind, a school of vermian species spiraling against the stream. The subsea life forms have a long, tubular body like worms, yet a thin membrane—let’s call it a strange kind of fin—runs around the tubular body in the shape of a screw. A dark screw brightened by yellow stripes and spots. And even then, she’s only able to distinguish this screw-shaped fin after she replays the footage of them caught in a long lidar burst in slow motion.
She finds them utterly fascinating, and studies them for a while, noticing they change the pitch of their screwfins by stretching their tubular bodies in order to maintain a more or less constant rotation speed as the flow of the undercurrent varies. Like old-fashioned wind turbines, she realizes, they maintain their RPM at different wind/water speeds. Probably because whatever they do, works most efficiently in that particular RPM range.
However, she can’t study them forever, and has no choice but take the next step: catch one and dissect it. While the Slow CEO is not exactly squeamish, she still has the kind of conscience that tries to minimize the loss of life. Unfortunately for that single Screw-Worm, bigger things are at stake.
The dissection shows even more interesting things. For one, the Screw-Worms perform chemosynthesis, for example, 12 H2S + 6 CO2 ➝ C6H12O6 + 6H2O + 12S. The carbohydrates they produce are partly broken down and reused for growing their tubular bodies, while the Sulfur—in combination with Calcium Carbonate—is used for expanding the screw fin, providing the yellow stripes and spots. Through some freak of random chance or evolution, their preferred RPM not only produces the lowest sound footprint but acts as a sonar absorbent, as well. Which makes her wonder: stealth from what?
The fast rotation of the Screw-Worms—they do spin incredibly fast—also generates heat which powers the chemosynthesis. These creatures are the algae of the deep seas, she realizes, so I can’t be the only one after them, right?
Their nervous system is rudimentary at best, so the single Screw-Worm she dissected probably hasn’t suffered pain. Which is all for the best, as she needs to catch quite a few more. For starters, she produces a strong and versatile net, then catches the school she’s been studying. She calculates the mass of Screw-Worms she caught and the amount she needs for a pressure dome. Not quite enough, so she continues in her search for more catch.
In the midst—well. more like a quarter—of her trawling expedition, Na-Yeli encounters a distant echo from her sonar. It’s both quite clear yet quite far away, so no sonar stealth capabilities should be involved. Since developing stealth capabilities is a survival trait, here in this deep black sea, she’s suspicious. Is it a trap? Yet, her innate curiosity compels her to check it out, if very carefully.
She heads towards the echo’s location, and the sonar footprint becomes ever clearer and larger as she approaches it. It’s relatively big and also relatively unmoving; that is, it’s in that rare place where all the ocean currents—and some of these can be quite turbulent and ferocious, Na-Yeli knows from experience—cancel out, a kind of unique calmness not unlike the legendary Sargasso Sea of yore. And also like the actual legend of that place (whose veracity has never been confirmed), it seems to have become a ‘Graveyard of Ships’. In this case a necropolis of space pods.
Remnants of previous expeditions that failed, Na-Yeli thinks, interesting, but that’s not what I’m here for. On top of that, she’s certainly not the type to dance on her competitors’ graves. However, she realizes, plenty of useful materials. More than sufficient for the pressure dome she has in mind.
Yet she doesn’t go to the Hyperwave Sea’s Graveyard of Spaceships directly, but approaches it in a circumspect manner, taking a few long circles around it in an effort to detect any predators or—who knows—those who lay in wait for her to take the bait. Recognizing ambushes was an important part of her training. However, after the most careful checks she can come up with in this Stygian Sea, she finds nothing. So, with all systems ready to make a run for it if things go astray, she moves towards the galactic debris site.
Then, as the sonar reflections become so sharp that she begins to discern separate vessels, but these are rather nondescript, probably because most of her predecessors also used shape-shifting metamaterials, making it impossible to predict which final form they would eventually end up with. Then she sees why nobody would like to go there: two sonar shadows that clearly resemble Crabs, creatures infamous across the Galaxy. On cue, her Geiger counter begins to click, while they’re still quite a bit away from them.
Bang-Bang Crabs are—supposedly—the survivors of a nuclear catastrophe (as it seems extremely unlikely that an alien species would settle there voluntarily). Symbionts—or parasites, depending on your point of view—that have integrated with nuclear-powered Von Neumann machines. Through an act of galactic pity, the Bang-Bang Crabs have been accepted in the Galactic Union of Species, which is why they’ve wound up here.
The planet Niflheim that orbits the sun Ragnarök is a total nuclear wasteland. The origin of the nuclear catastrophe is lost in the mists of time, only the result is visible: a planet whose crust and atmosphere are so saturated with nuclear radiation that it’s deadly for almost every known alien species, with precious few exceptions. Strangely, though, not all activity had died, as the planet was crawling with a plague of replicating robots—crab-like Von Neumann machines—that, being nuclear-powered, constantly plow the planet’s crust for fissile materials. In the process they release even more Uranium, Plutonium, and their ilk, worsening the already intense radiation. A nuclear greenhouse effect, if you will.
Then, somehow, the crab-like Von Neumann machines got infected with the sturdy remnants of the Niflheim’s biological life—possibly mutated cockroaches, hyper-evolved scorpions, or others, it’s anybody’s guess—and the Bang-Bang Crabs were born.
The Bang-Bang Crabs stopped digging up nuclear materials willy-nilly, only doing so when their own was running out, and as a consequence, the planet’s radiation reached a stable equilibrium. They also halted the replication process gone wild, and the Bang-Bang Crab population slowly reduced, as the symbionts either did not believe in or simply did not want to reproduce through replication.
They did so—inadvertently or not—by increasing their size until each Bang-Bang Crab had amassed a cache of nuclear fuel that was barely below critical mass (they probably found out the hard way, as a short, yet intense spike in the planet’s radiation record showed). It was so successful that the population kept reducing, getting close to extinction level until the symbionts finally applied—or re-introduced—sexual procreation.
Normally, if two Bang-Bang Crabs came too close, the result would be mutual destruction as their combined nuclear caches exceeded critical mass, resulting in a nuclear explosion and its accompanying mushroom cloud. So they always kept their distance. However, as the nuclear cache of a Bang-Bang Crab ran through its half-life, its available energy decreased. Then, at the end of its useful life, a depleted Bang-Bang Crab would search out a congener in the same condition and they would mate. That is, the symbionts would clone themselves like crazy and the replication process would be allowed to restart for the shortest of times as the two nuclear caches were merged. Somehow, the combined nuclear caches were still above the critical mass, and the mating Bang-Bang Crabs would go out, indeed, with a bang.
The same bang that distributed miniature Crabs with their cloned symbionts over a wide area. The lucky ones that were able to mine new nuclear resources in time were the offspring that survived and kept growing just short of reaching critical mass. There is no intelligent species in the known Universe that does not make jokes about the Bang-Bang Crabs’ sexual procreation.
Reminiscing about it brings a smile to Na-Yeli’s lips. However, it also means that, due to the nuclear radiation, she can’t use all that otherwise easily available material for her pressure dome. In the same way that the Sargassum seaweed—while simultaneously being the breeding place for European and American eels—supposedly smothered the old sea vessels of yore into the Sargasso Sea’s Graveyard of Ships, the Bang-Bang Crabs’ nuclear radiation smothered all space pods that wound up in the calm spot of this Stygian Sea.
No possibility to ransack this for elements, no use looking for survivors—the Bang-Bang Crabs radioactivity will have taken care of that—so Na-Yeli has no other choice than make a quick recording of this floating necropolis, and then continue with her fishing expedition.
—or—
Author’s note: it’s been a busy week at the day job in combination with an early heatwave. Temperatures are going a little bit down next week (from tropical to very warm), so I hope to do some catching up. Take care!